Hi,

The authors below have treated "reputation" as an antecedent of trust:

Anderson and Weitz (1989) ; Anderson and Narus (1990) ; Anderson and Weitz (1992) ; Sako (1992) ; Ganesan (1994) ; Doney and Cannon (1997) ; Smith and Barclay (1997) ; Liu et al. (2006) ; Keh and Xie (2009).

Hope it helps !

H.A

You can try with this paper

http://www.iiia.csic.es/~nardine/pubs/acmTist2014.pdf

Thank you for your reply. Do you know any existing tool which I can use? 

Hey Ameneh,

there is a whole host of papers out there that deals with the calculation of trust values by applying a trust metric on the experiences gathered by the agents. Depending on your concrete systems, the meaning of these trust values and the way to get to them can vary greatly. The seminal work in that area is Steve Marsh's Ph.D. thesis in which he discusses the most important issues. It was written 26 years ago, but it is still valid and I know that he is working on an updated version to be published as a book next year. You can find the thesis at https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/2010/1/Formalising%20trust%20as%20a%20computational%20concept.pdf

Based on this work, many people thought about specific trust models and how to make use of the generated values in decision procedures. The list of authors provided by Houcine is a good starting point, but of course there are many others. I am not aware of software solutions that you can use out of the box. This might be due to the fact that each system seems to have a very specific notion of trust that is not easily generalisable. The basic process is always the same: collect expectations about the behaviour of others, collect evidence about their actual behaviour, compare the two and derive a value through a metric, exchange this information (that would be the reputation part), and use the value in a decision procedure. But what the value means and how to get to it (the metric) differs greatly. The other problem is that there is very little standardisation in multi-agent system platforms, so you can't just have a package that can be universally applied.

Having said that, implementing an actual trust system yourself if you know your implementation platform, your metric, and the purpose of the trust values is not very difficult. Let me know if you need more pointers for that.

Best,

Jan-Philipp

@Jan-Philipp 

Thank you for such a comprehensive reply. I know that trust factors vary from one to another one. I have to think about what kind of information I can observe as an agent to build up my belief set. Thank you again for the document I read it before, but definitely, I will have at it again.

I agree about the lack a universal trust package because everyone has the own definition of trust.

Regarding implementation, I know most of the cases done by NetLogo, but I'd prefer to use BDI agent since I am interested in building up a normative agent.

It would be great if you have something in your mind for implementation and share it with me. 

Best Regards,

Ameneh 

Hey Ameneh,

sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Normative agents are a good way to go since trust (or more precisely the exploitation of positive trust relationships) can act as an incentive for following norms.

I am not sure which kind of pointer you are looking for, though. It depends a bit on what you are stuck with. I am sure you are aware of BDI frameworks such as JADE or JADEX. If it's about the actual implementation of a normative agent, I have attached a short paper of mine. I also encourage you to look at Jan Kantert's work, who has been investigating normative MAS from a very practical perspective and gives many pointers at implementation issues in his papers. One of them I attach below, but you can find more if you look at his ResearchGate page.

After this shameless pitch of my own work and that of my collaborators, I also encourage you to look at the papers from the NMAS community. These are more theoretical, but provide many insights into what works in normative systems and especially how the norms need to be designed. Finally, the AAMAS community has produced a lot of papers on incentive-compatible mechanism design which is directly related to what I think you are trying to do.

I hope this helps,

best,

Jan-Philipp

http://jade.tilab.com/

https://www.activecomponents.org/#/project/news

Article An Effective Implementation of Norms in Trust-Aware Open Sel...

Article Estimation of Reward and Decision Making for Trust-Adaptive ...

Thank you for your input. I know Jadex and Jade. I am currently using JADEX for my implementation. I could not find the NMAS community. Is it Norm Multi-Agent System? 

NMAS is for "Normative Multi-Agent Systems". Relevant players in the area are Guido Boella, Leon van der Torre, Pablo Noriega, Michael Luck, and others.

Thank you. Yes, I know most of them.