Certified reputation: how an agent can trust a stranger

Current computational trust models are usually built either on an agent's direct experience of an interaction partner (interaction trust) or reports provided by third parties about their experiences with a partner (witness reputation). However, both of these approaches have their limitations. Models using direct experience often result in poor performance until an agent has had a sufficient number of interactions to build up a reliable picture of a particular partner and witness reports rely on self-interested agents being willing to freely share their experience. To this end, this paper presents Certified Reputation (CR), a novel model of trust that can overcome these limitations. Specifically, CR works by allowing agents to actively provide third-party references about their previous performance as a means of building up the trust in them of their potential interaction partners. By so doing, trust relationships can quickly be established with very little cost to the involved pa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Trung Dong Huynh, Nicholas R. Jennings, Nigel R. Shadbolt
• Keywords: ATAL 2006, Computational Trust Models, Intelligent Agents, Interaction Partners, Trust