A Reputation Model Based on Testimonies

Reputation mechanisms are used to increase reliability and performance in virtual societies. Different decentralized reputation models have been proposed based on interactions among agents. Each system agent evaluates and stores the reputation of the agents with whom they have interacted and can give testimony to other agents about these reputations. The main disadvantages of these approaches when applied to open large-scale multi-agent systems are the difficulty of establishing strong links between the agents and the sometimes infeasible witness search process. In this paper we propose a hybrid reputation system with centralized and decentralized characteristics to overcome these problems. Reputations are provided by the system agents themselves but also by centralized subsystems that can be easily reached by any agent and can supply reliable reputations of any agent based on testimonies about undesired agent behaviour. Such behaviour is characterized by the violation of system norms.

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