Building Relationships with Trust
In this chapter we put together two major threads of work: trust in the enactment of contracts and the modelling of relationships between agents. We depart from previous work where trust is defined as the relationship between commitment of action and inst
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Building Relationships with Trust Carles Sierra and John Debenham
29.1 Introduction In this chapter trust is presented as the foundation for a rich sense of friendship between agents in a multiagent system. When agents interact their growing history of illocutionary dialogues is their relationship. An agent understands its relationships using various measures that summarise its dialogue history. These summary measures, of which trust is fundamental, enable relationships to be understood in the context of a multifaceted continuum rather than the simplistic cooperative/competitive divide. On the basis of this understanding an agent may choose: to form speculative beliefs concerning the future behaviour of other agents, to decide who to interact with under given circumstances, and to determine how to interact with them. This opens the way for an agent to proactively influence its dialogues with the aim of shaping its relationships so that they provide some degree of protection against future unknowns in an uncertain world. Section 29.2 introduces the framework within which the work is developed; in particular, the term trust is defined in the context of the signing, enactment and evaluation of contracts. Section 29.3 describes the components of the trust model: the ontology, the core trust mechanism, the representation of prior knowledge, and the context. Then in Sect. 29.4 the relationship model is introduced—this models the relationships between agents. Section 29.5 draws the previous ideas together by discussing negotiation.
C. Sierra () IIIA – CSIC, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] J. Debenham QCIS, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Ossowski (ed.), Agreement Technologies, Law, Governance and Technology Series 8, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5583-3__29, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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29.2 Trust The informal meaning of the statement “agent α trusts agent β ” is that α expects β to act in a way that is somehow preferred by α . Human agents seldom trust another for any action that they may take—it is more usual to develop a trusted expectation with respect to a particular set of actions. For example, “I trust John to deliver fresh vegetables” whilst the quality of John’s advice on investments may be terrible. This section describes trust when the set of actions is restricted to negotiating, signing and enacting contracts that are expressed using some particular ontology. A multiagent system {α , β1 , . . . , βo , ξ , θ1 , . . . , θt }, contains an agent α that interacts with negotiating agents, X = {βi }, information providing agents, I = {θ j }, and an institutional agent, ξ , that represents the institution where the interactions are assumed to happen (Arcos et al. 2005). Institutions give a normative context to interactions that simplify matters (e.g. an agent can’t make an offer, have it accepted, and then renege on it). The institutional agent ξ may form opinions on the actors and activities in the
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