Decentralized reputation-based trust for assessing agent reliability under aggregate feedback

Reputation mechanisms allow agents to establish trust in other agents’ intentions and capabilities in the absence of direct interactions. In this paper, we are concerned with establishing trust on the basis of reputation information in open, decentralized systems of interdependent autonomous agents. We present a completely decentralized reputation mechanism to increase the accuracy of agents’ assessments of other agents’ capabilities and allow them to develop appropriate levels of trust in each other as providers of reliable information. Computer simulations show the reputation system’s ability to track an agent’s actual capabilities. The work described in this paper was performed in the context of the cim project on Cybernetic Incident Management, sponsored by the Dutch government (senter) as project number TSIT2021. See http://www.almende.com/cim/ for more information. We are grateful to Floortje Alkemade, Pınar Yolum and Pieter Jan ’t Hoen for stimulating discussions, and to three anonymous referees for helpful comments.