Building reputation-based agreements: Collective opinions as information sources

Abstract

Reputation mechanisms, which can be used in organisational environments, have been developed during last few years as valid methods to allow agents to better select their partners. In most of works presented in the literature, reputation is summarised as a value, typically a number, that represents an opinion sent by an agent to another about a certain third party. In this work, we put forward a novel concept of reputation-based agreement in order to support the reputation definition, as well as, some desirable properties about it. We define a reputation service that collects opinions from agents, so creating agreements over situations. This service will also be in charge of presenting the information by using different informative mechanisms. On the other hand, we analyse how to enforce agents to send their opinions to the reputation service by adding incentive mechanisms. Finally, two different case studies are presented to exemplify our work. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.