Sub-Game Perfection in Semantic Web Services

We describe the dependence of web services on the pre and post conditions that trigger their use in on-line B2B and B2C transactions. We build a model that highlights these dependencies probabilistically and illustrate the use of the model with an example. We place this model in the context of the development of the nascent Semantic Web. Our result is that, once many web services are chained together, this dependence on different and increasingly complex triggers will produce a decay in the number of successful uses of the web service. This result lays a general theoretical foundation for a game-theoretic examination of web service interaction. We conclude the paper with a program for further work in this area.