Trust and the economy of symbolic goods: A contribution to the scalability of open multi-agent systems

Abstract

Today, the importance of trust to issues of social coordination seems to be largely accepted in Distributed AI and sociology. This paper suggests a sociological multi-level concept of trust to provide suitable solutions to problems of large-scale open multi-agent systems (MAS). For this purpose, we firstly analyze DAI concepts dealing with the notion of trust and examine effects of trust on the scalability of MAS. We argue that trust itself must be modeled as a social mechanism that allows the scaling up of agent coordination in open MAS. Secondly, we summarize sociological conceptions of trust and outline problems concerning the build-up and diffusion of trust from a sociological perspective. Finally, we introduce a multi-level approach to trust by referring to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the economy of symbolic goods including basic social mechanisms in order to cope with the coordination of large numbers of heterogeneous agents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.