Trusting groups in coalition formation using social distance

Abstract

In environments where distributed team formation is key, and defections are possible, the use of trust as social capital allows social norms to be defined and compared. An agent can use this information, when invited to join a group or coalition, to decide whether or not its utility will be increased by joining. In this work a social network approach is used to define and reason about the relationships contained in the agent community. Previous baseline work is extended with two decision making mechanisms. These are compared by simulating an abstract grid-like network, and preliminary results are reported. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.