Designing institutional scaffolds for society-scale human–agent coordination
DAI 2026 · 8th Intl. Conference on Distributed AICity University of Hong Kong29 November 2026
Overview
From the agent to the scaffold
The dominant research program in agentic AI is the improvement of the
individual agent. But the scale now anticipated — billions of people interleaved with
orders of magnitude more artificial agents — poses a coordination problem that no
amount of individual capability resolves, and that legal and behavioural guardrails
were never built to carry.
Durable coordination at society scale has never come from better individuals. It
comes from structure: role-defined scaffolds that produce robust, repeatable
decisions which other institutions can accept as legitimate inputs.
A courtroom, a peer review process, a parliamentary procedure — each reliably
produces outcomes better than the people staffing it. The intelligence is invested in
the scaffold rather than the occupant: in the separation of roles, the rules of
evidence, the adversarial structure, the appeal path, the accumulated precedent.
Markets are the one such structure our field has taken seriously, and their flatness
and emergent order are genuinely powerful — but a purified economics cannot by itself
build a society. Standing, membership, admissibility, the right to appeal, and the
legitimacy of an outcome to those bound by it are not exchangeable value.
This workshop proposes that the design of agent institutions — nested,
role-defined, populated by humans and agents alike — is the load-bearing problem for
society-scale multi-agent AI, and that it is buildable and measurable now rather than
a matter for speculation.
Three curves have crossed to make this urgent. Multi-agent deployments have moved
from demonstration to production, and their characteristic failures are no longer
reasoning failures but organizational ones — role confusion, unbounded
delegation, responsibility diffusion, unauditable decision chains. An interoperability
substrate has arrived fast enough that the question has shifted from whether agents
can interoperate to under what procedures, with what standing, and answerable to whom.
And the governance literature has converged on the finding that risks in agent
collectives are structurally distinct from single-agent risks, and are not addressed
by per-model alignment.
Each points at the same missing layer. That layer has a name in the older
multi-agent systems literature — institution — which the current
agentic wave has largely rediscovered without inheriting. This workshop convenes the
multi-agent systems, negotiation, mechanism design, agent protocol, and governance
communities around a single shift in the unit of analysis.
An institutional scaffold. Roles are defined so as to facilitate
cooperation, adversariality, and legitimate decisions. What matters is not the
individual occupants but the intelligence built into the structure.
The organizing question
What transfers, and what breaks
Human institutions are the only large-scale, long-tested corpus of
coordination designs we have. They are also built on assumptions about their
participants that agents systematically violate. Sorting the transferable from the
untransferable is the field's most useful near-term project, and it is this workshop's
spine.
The Meaning Alignment Institute's
AGI Institutions matrix gives the best
available answer to the prior question — which institutions a world with
powerful AI needs, arranged by scale from dyadic to global and by informational basis
from protocols through rights, incentives, and norms to thick commitments. Read the
three columns below as the next question put to every cell in that matrix: agent
negotiation and bargaining, agent-to-agent mediation and contracts, autonomous
corporate bylaws and grievance boards, deliberative value elicitation, AI commons
management, international tribunals. For each, which part of the human original
survives translation to agents, which part quietly stops working, and which part has
no human precedent at all?
Transfers well
The portable patterns
Role separation. Prosecution and defence; author, reviewer,
editor. Splitting a decision into roles with distinct information and incentives is
substrate-independent.
Structured adversariality. Requiring a claim to survive a party
motivated to destroy it is a general epistemic technology, not a human quirk.
Appeal and escalation. A procedure with no route to
reconsideration is brittle regardless of who executes it.
Evidentiary standards. Rules about what may be considered and
what must be disclosed — which agents can satisfy far more completely than humans,
since traces can be recorded in full.
Registries and standing. Checking who is entitled to act in a
role is easier with cryptographic identity than with human credentials.
Precedent. Prior decisions as a compressed store of
institutional learning.
Breaks
The false friends
Deliberation-by-delay. Cooling-off periods, multiple readings,
sleeping on it — the delay is doing epistemic work. Machine speed voids the
mechanism while appearing to follow the procedure.
One member, one vote. Assumes members are costly to create.
Agents can be forked, so quorums, juries, and majority voting degenerate.
Independence of judgment. An impartial jury assumes jurors fail
independently. Twelve instances of one base model fail together, and the
aggregation that makes juries work disappears.
Sanction and deterrence. Fines, disbarment, and shame all
presuppose a persistent self that bears cost across time. An agent can be
terminated and re-instantiated.
Oaths and internalized norms. A commitment made in one session
may have no purchase in the next.
Consent and representation. Legitimacy derives from the consent
of the governed — but agents are not principals, leaving the source of legitimacy
for agent-made decisions unresolved.
No analogue
Native to agents
The harness as constitution. Tool access, context, session
continuity, and memory permissions already determine what an agent may do and know.
Nothing in human institutional theory corresponds to it.
Verifiable procedure. Execution traces mean compliance can be
checked rather than trusted — dissolving a problem human institutions spend
enormous resources on.
Counterfactual branching. A deliberation can be forked, run to
completion along several branches, and compared. Human institutions get one run.
Institutions testable before deployment. A scaffold can be
simulated against adversarial occupants before it governs anything real:
constitutional design with an empirical loop.
Literal role swapping. The invariance property can actually be
measured rather than asserted.
Cryptographic delegation. Authority scoped, attenuated, and
revoked with a precision paper-based delegation never permitted.
We solicit work that adds to, contests, or empirically tests any row in these three
lists — including negative results, where a human institutional form was tried on an
agent population and failed, with a diagnosis of why.
Scope
Topics
We solicit contributions across seven areas, stated as problems a distributed AI
audience can attack.
01
Scaffolding
Organizational and normative multi-agent systems revisited for the LLM era.
Electronic institutions; role, norm, and protocol specification languages;
institutional descriptions agents can read, negotiate, and be bound by. The
harness as institution: tool access, session continuity, memory commons.
02
Negotiation, bargaining, contracts
Automated negotiation and bargaining protocols between agents; agent-to-agent
contracting and enforcement; mediation and arbitration between agents acting for
conflicting principals; commitment devices and escrow; renegotiation and breach.
And the hard question underneath: what a contract even means between parties that
can be duplicated or terminated at will.
03
Automated mechanism design
Mechanism design as a component of institutional design rather than a synonym
for it. Automated and learning-based mechanism design; auction, matching, and
market design where participants are agents; incentive compatibility under
duplicable identities; algorithmic collusion among LLM agents. We especially want
papers mapping the boundary where incentive alignment stops being sufficient and
procedural or normative structure must take over.
04
The limits of flatness
Coordination over goods poorly represented as exchangeable value — standing,
membership, admissibility of evidence, the right to appeal, the legitimacy of an
outcome to those bound by it. Commons regimes and polycentric governance for
compute, data, memory, and attention.
05
Generative adversariality
Structured conflict as a design material. Adversarial debate under an impartial
referee; prosecution and defence as separated roles; red-teaming as a standing
institutional function rather than a pre-deployment activity. And its failure
modes: collusion, capture, escalation.
06
Role-based interchangeability
The measurement problem of the field. Institutional performance should be a
property of the template, not the occupant. Metrics, benchmarks, and testbeds in
which the object of evaluation is the scaffold — and results on when role
interchangeability across humans and agents is achievable, and when it is not.
07
Nesting and legitimacy
Institutions whose reliable outputs are another's necessary inputs. Composition
and interface standards; meta-institutions, appellate structures, registries.
Accountability when consequential decisions are made by processes that are opaque,
non-human, and too fast for meaningful oversight of individual outputs.
08
Cultural interoperability
Institutional pluralism as a technical design constraint. Conflicting legal
ontologies and normative traditions as an interoperability problem. The risk of
shallow skeuomorphism — bolting agents onto institutions designed for other eras
of information exchange — and the reverse channel, where new hybrid forms reform
the cultures they emerged from.
09
Institutions of knowledge
Peer review is the canonical institutional scaffold, and it is being rebuilt in
public. AI-assisted and AI-participant review; credit and disclosure regimes;
reproducibility infrastructure; the design of scientific institutions that admit
agents as participants.
Context
Related work
We are not the only people to have noticed this gap, and this workshop is designed
to convene the existing efforts rather than claim priority over them.
COIN / COINE
Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms and Ethics for Governance of
Multi-Agent Systems has run at AAMAS since 2005 and is this workshop's direct
ancestor. It is classical-MAS-native — formal norm specification, organizational
models, deontic logic. It does not engage the LLM agent society literature, and is not
a venue where governance scholars present. We cite it as foundational and would
welcome its organizers here.
The AGI Institutions matrix
The Meaning Alignment Institute's map at
agi-institutions.org is the most
systematic public account of this space we know of. It arranges the institutions
needed for a world with powerful AI across two axes — scale, from dyadic through
group, community, and national to global; and informational basis, from protocols and
preferences through rights, incentives, expertise, and norms to thick commitments.
Its cells include agent negotiation and bargaining, agent-to-agent mediation and
contracts, autonomous corporate bylaws and grievance boards, market design for
societies of agents, AI commons management, institutional transparency regimes, and
international tribunals.
It is complementary to what we propose. That matrix enumerates which
institutions are needed; this workshop asks how a given scaffold is built,
measured, and shown to work. We would like to programme a session around it.
Reading list
The work this workshop builds on, grouped by the layer it supplies. Each is an
input to institutional design; none addresses role structure, composition, and
legitimacy together.
Institutions, norms, and organizations in multi-agent systems
Tomašev, Franklin, Leibo et al. (Google DeepMind).Virtual Agent Economies.
arXiv:2509.10147, 2025. The "sandbox economy" framework —
the closest major-lab statement of the problem.
Hammond et al. (Cooperative AI Foundation).Multi-Agent Risks from
Advanced AI. arXiv:2502.14143, 2025. Establishes that
risks in agent collectives are structurally distinct from single-agent risks.
Kolt.Governing AI Agents.
Notre Dame Law Review 101, 2025. Principal–agent theory and
common-law agency doctrine applied to AI agents.
To our knowledge no workshop combines institutional design, LLM agent societies,
negotiation and mechanism design, and governance — and none of the above has been held
in Asia-Pacific.
Benchmark
The Institution Design Challenge
Ahead of the workshop we release scenario environments in which individually strong
agents reliably fail for structural rather than capability reasons — allocation of a
depleting shared resource under private information; a dispute between principals whose
agents hold conflicting instructions and share no escalation path; multi-round
delegation where liability for an error must remain assignable after the fact.
Teams submit a scaffold: roles, procedures, admissible
communications, decision rules, and appeal paths — as code plus a short institutional
specification.
Invariance under occupant substitution
Entries are scored on outcome quality, but the criterion we want to introduce with
this challenge is the role-occupancy swap test. Each scaffold is
evaluated repeatedly with its role occupants swapped: across model families, across
capability tiers, with a human in one role, and with a deliberately degraded or
adversarial occupant in a randomly chosen role.
A good institution degrades gracefully. A scaffold whose measured performance is
really the performance of its strongest occupant is, by this criterion, not an
institution at all.
The harness, environments, and baseline scaffolds will be released publicly and
maintained regardless of how many entries the challenge attracts.
Format
Program
A full day combining invited talks, contributed papers, a benchmark session, a live
experiment, and community roadmapping. The schedule below is provisional and subject to
the slot allocated by the DAI 2026 chairs.
Time
Session
09:00
Framing: The Limits of Flatness — the case for the scaffold as unit of analysis
09:20
Invited talk I — institutional and organizational multi-agent systems: what the field already solved, and what LLM agents broke
10:00
Contributed session I — scaffolds, roles, and protocols
11:00
Break
11:20
Invited talk II — agent economies and the limits of market coordination
12:00
Posters and demos — institution testbeds and environments
13:00
Lunch
14:00
Institution Design Challenge — results, baselines, and the role-occupancy swap analysis
15:00
Live adversarial scaffold — one contested question put through referee, adversarial debate, and jury, with humans and deployed agents occupying the roles, and the composition varied mid-session
16:00
Break
16:20
Contributed session II — legitimacy, accountability, and cultural interoperability
17:00
Roadmapping breakouts — drafting a public registry of institutional primitives
17:40
Closing panel and synthesis
Outputs
Workshop report — the primitives registry, challenge results, and
the transcript of the live scaffold session, released openly within eight weeks.
Challenge harness and environments — open source, released before
the workshop and maintained after it.
Contributed papers — non-archival; authors retain full rights.
Submissions
Call for papers
The call opens if and when the workshop is accepted by the DAI 2026
chairs. Details below are the intended shape, published early so that
prospective authors can plan.
Format — 4-page extended abstracts, plus unlimited references
and appendices, in the DAI 2026 style.
Non-archival. Work may be concurrently under review elsewhere.
This is deliberate: it raises the quality available to a first-edition workshop and
lowers the barrier for legal, governance, and humanities scholars whose publication
norms differ from those of machine learning.
Review — double-blind, two reviews per submission, organizers
arbitrating. Reviewing norms, including disclosure rules for AI-assisted review, will
be published alongside the call. Given the subject matter, we intend to treat our own
review process as a documented instance of institutional design and to report on it.
Presentation — accepted work appears as short talks and in the
poster and demo session.
Registration — all participants register for DAI 2026.
We particularly welcome submissions that would not find an easy home at a purely
technical venue: institutional analysis, legal and normative design, and empirical
studies of deployed agent organizations, alongside systems and benchmark work.
Schedule
Key dates
Date
Milestone
30 Jul 2026
Workshop proposal submitted to DAI 2026
TBC
Notification from the DAI 2026 chairs
TBC
Call for papers opens; challenge environments released
TBC
Paper submission deadline
TBC
Notifications; challenge entry deadline
29 Nov 2026
Workshop — City University of Hong Kong
Jan 2027
Workshop report and primitives registry released
DAI 2026 runs 29 November – 2 December 2026 at City University of Hong Kong, under
the theme Agentic AI Goes Live: Science, Systems, and Societies. See the
conference site for the main program.
People
Organizers
Provisional — the organizing committee is still being confirmed.
Organizer
Botao “Amber” Hu
University of Oxford
Organizer
Helena Rong
New York University Shanghai
Further co-organizers to be announced. The committee is being
built to span multi-agent systems, mechanism design, governance and law, and
philosophy of computation, with a Hong Kong anchor for regional programme balance.
Invited speakers
To be announced. Speakers will be listed here only once they have
confirmed. Invitations that are outstanding will be marked as such rather than
presented as commitments.
Program committee
To be announced. The committee will be balanced across multi-agent
systems, mechanism design, agent infrastructure, governance and law, and philosophy
of computation, and across career stage and region.
Contact
Get in touch
If you work on institutional design, organizational multi-agent systems, agent
governance, or the social architecture of agent populations — or if you would like to
enter the Institution Design Challenge — we would like to hear from you.