Abstract
This paper discusses the role that expectations have in agent reasoning, and focuses on the author’s previous work on modelling and monitoring expectations with a complex temporal structure, and its application to expectation monitoring in virtual worlds. It also presents a proposal for a new extension of this work by integrating it with the event calculus to simplify the definition of institutions with actions that create expectations. It is shown how this “expectation event calculus” could provide a uniform basis for reasoning about various types of expectation, and commitments and norms in particular.