. Commitments are crucial to understanding and designing autonomous agents and multiagent systems. We propose a definition of commitments that applies especially well to agents in information-rich applications, such as electronic commerce and virtual enterprises. Our approach has a number of important features, including -- not gratuitously translating social concepts to psychological concepts -- distinguishing between satisfied and inapplicable commitments -- incorporating social policies to handle the creation, satisfaction, and cancelation of commitments -- relating commitments to organizational structure in a multiagent system -- showing how commitments are acquired by agents as a consequence of adopting a role. 1 Introduction Commitments are central to DAI. In this paper, "commitment" refers to social, not psychological, commitment. Commitments have drawn much research attention because they are an important abstraction for characterizing, understanding, analyzing, and desig...