Abstract

Expressing contractual agreements electronically potentially allows agents to automatically perform functions surrounding contract use: establishment, fulfilment, renegotiation etc. For such automation to be used for real business concerns, there needs to be a high level of trust in the agent-based system. While there has been much research on simulating trust between agents, there are areas where such trust is harder to establish. In particular, contract proposals may come from parties that an agent has had no prior interaction with and, in competitive business-to-business environments, little reputation information may be available. In human practice, trust in a proposed contract is determined in part from the content of the proposal itself, and the similarity of the content to that of prior contracts, executed to varying degrees of success. In this paper, we argue that such analysis is also appropriate in automated …

Date

2009

Authors

Paul Groth, Simon Miles, Sanjay Modgil, Nir Oren, Michael Luck, Yolanda Gil

Conference

Engineering Societies in the Agents World X: 10th International Workshop, ESAW 2009, Utrecht, The Netherlands, November 18-20, 2009. Proceedings 10

Pages

132-147

Publisher

Springer Berlin Heidelberg