Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific discovery. Yet seemingly science also progresses despite irreproducible results, indicating that the relationship between reproducibility and other desirable properties of scientific discovery is not well understood. These properties include early discovery of truth, persistence on truth once it is discovered, and time spent on truth in a long-term scientific inquiry. We build a mathematical model of scientific discovery that presents a viable framework to study its desirable properties including reproducibility. In this framework, we assume that scientists adopt a model-centric approach to discover the true model generating data in a stochastic process of scientific discovery. We analyze the properties of this process using Markov chain theory, Monte Carlo methods, and agent-based modeling. We show that the scientific process may not converge to truth even if scientific results are reproducible and that irreproducible results do not necessarily imply untrue results. The proportion of different research strategies represented in the scientific population, scientists’ choice of methodology, the complexity of truth, and the strength of signal contribute to this counter-intuitive finding. Important insights include that innovative research speeds up the discovery of scientific truth by facilitating the exploration of model space and epistemic diversity optimizes across desirable properties of scientific discovery.

We understand a socio-technical system (STS) as a cyber-physical system in which two or more autonomous parties interact via or about technical elements, including the parties’ resources and actions. As information technology begins to pervade every corner of human life, STSs are becoming ever more common, and the challenge of governing STSs is becoming increasingly important. We advocate a normative basis for governance, wherein norms represent the standards of correct behaviour that each party in an STS expects from others. A major benefit of focussing on norms is that they provide a socially realistic view of interaction among autonomous parties that abstracts low-level implementation details. Overlaid on norms is the notion of a sanction as a negative or positive reaction to potentially any violation of or compliance with an expectation. Although norms have been well studied as regards governance for STSs, sanctions have not. Our understanding and usage of norms is inadequate for the purposes of governance unless we incorporate a comprehensive representation of sanctions. We address the aforementioned gap by proposing (i) a sanction typology that reflects the relevant features of sanctions, and (ii) a conceptual sanctioning process model providing a functional structure for sanctioning in STS. We demonstrate our contributions via a motivating scenario from the domain of renewable energy trading.

Protection rackets cause economic and social damage across the world. States typically combat protection rackets using legal strategies that target the racketeers with legislation, strong sentencing, and increasing the presence and involvement of police officers. Nongovernmental organizations, conversely, focus on the rest of the population and counter protection rackets using a social approach. These organisations attempt to change the actions and social norms of community members with education, promotional campaigns, and discussions. We use an agent‐based model, which draws on established theories of protection rackets and combines features of sociological and economic perspectives to modelling social interactions, to test the effects of legal and social approaches. We find that a legal approach is a necessary component of a policy approach, that social only approaches should not be used because they lead to large increases in violence, and that a combination of the two works best, although even this must be used carefully.