Scheduling Non-Enforceable Contracts among Autonomous Agents

With the emergence of fast and standardized communication infrastructures over which separately designed agents of different organizations can interact in real-time, there is an increasing demand for cooperation mechanisms that allow to carry out inter-organizational cooperations in a safe way. The lack of external control over an agent's decisions, resources and actions hamper the usage of traditional transaction and workflow technology to make selfinterested agents cooperate, i.e., agents cannot not be forced from a mediating cooperation instance to continue a cooperation. The challenge is, therefore, to design a cooperation mechanism that motivates cooperating agents to carry out a specified contract and, in case of unilateral defection, ensures that none of the cooperators can benefit from the situation. In this paper, we present a domain independent framework how non-enforceable cooperations can be made safe against unilateral defection. We have developed a utility-based sch...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: COOPIS
• Authors: Thomas Tesch, Karl Aberer
• Keywords: Cooperation Mechanism, COOPIS 1998, Information Management, Mediating Cooperation Instance, Unilateral Defection