Norms and Electronic Institutions

The term Electronic Institution seems to be well accepted in the agent community and to a certain extent also in the e-commerce research community. However, a search for a definition of an electronic institution does not yield any results on the Internet. This is different for the term institution. North [9] defines institutions (more or less) to be a set of norms that govern the interactions of a group of people. Examples are family and government. Here we are not so much interested in giving a very precise definition of an institution, but just want to note that the concept refers to a very abstract notion of a set of norms or social structure.