An incentive compatible reputation mechanism

Abstract

Traditional centralised approaches to security are difficult to apply to large, distributed marketplaces in which software agents operate. Developing a notion of trust that is based on the reputation of agents can provide a softer notion of security that is sufficient for many multi-agent applications. In this paper, we address the issue of incentivecompatibility (i.e. how to make it optimal for agents to share reputation information truthfully), by introducing a sidepayment scheme, organised through a set of broker agents, that makes it rational for software agents to truthfully share the reputation information they have acquired in their past experience. We also show how to use a cryptographic mechanism to protect the integrity of reputation information and to achieve a tight bounding between the identity and reputation of an agent.

Reputation-Based Service Level Agreements for Web Services

“…As part of the interaction, providers can deliver signed one-time certificates that can later be used by clients to provide feedback. A concrete implementation of such a security mechanism for reputation mechanisms is presented in [7].…”

Enhanced Reputation Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

“…The score of satisfaction for a service in real world is so subjective that it can depend on factors such as provided service quality, service quality expectation, environment (place, weather) and even mood. In order to evaluate subjective degree of satisfaction, we apply a method of quantifying degree of satisfaction based on the Quality of Service (QoS) 7 an agent a receives from another agent o. Given n dimensions of QoS (e.g., availability, service latency) d i (i = 1..n) which agent a cares about, a states in its request (b 1 , b 2 ,..,b n ) in which b i is the value (either minimum or maximum) for dimension d i .…”

“…Jurca and Faltings [7] propose an incentive-compatible reputation system by introducing special broker agents named R-agents, which sell reputation information to and buy reputation information from agents. The payoff for an agent selling reputation information to an R-agent depends on whether its provided information coincides with the future reports on the same agent.…”

“…Existing reputation systems either do not address the aforementioned incentive problems (e.g., [5,6]), or depend on some (centralized) trustworthy entity (e.g., [1,7]). Our approach, which is targeted at mobile ad hoc networks, does not depend on any trustworthy entity or any centralized reputation storage, and possesses the aforementioned desired properties.…”

“CONFESS”. Eliciting Honest Feedback Without Independent Verification Authorities

“…[13] and [8] describe such schemes that make truth revelation a Nash equilibrium. A problem with these schemes however, is that they require certain constraints on the behavior of the sellers and on the beliefs of the reporting buyers: i.e.…”