Adaptive Brokering in Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce

Norman, Tim and Sleeman, Derek and Chapman, Nial (2003) Adaptive Brokering in Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Twenty-third SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 339-352, Cambridge.

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In this paper we advocate an approach that extends models of trust and reputation to take into account the competence of agents. The argument is that such an approach will lead to more reliable agent-mediated electronic commerce environments than those in which agents are simply considered to have cooperated or defected. If there is a mismatch between the advertised and actual competence of an agent and the agent fails to complete a task as a consequence of this mismatch, then the description of this agent's competence should be refined in addition to any loss in reputation. Consequently, this agent is less likely to be employed for an inappropriate task in the future. Two models of adaptive brokering are presented in this paper that illustrate the use of refinement techniques in developing effective brokering mechanisms for agent-mediated electronic commerce.

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