Abstract:

In open multi-agent systems trust is necessary to improve cooperation by enabling agents to choose good partners. Most trust models work by taking, in addition to direct experiences, other agents’ communicated evaluations into account. However, in an open multi-agent system other agents may use different trust models and as such the evaluations they communicate are based on different principles. This article shows that trust alignment is a crucial tool in this communication. Furthermore we show that trust alignment improves significantly if the description of
the evidence, upon which a trust evaluation is based, is taken into account.

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In countries like Spain, and particularly in its Mediterranean coast, there is a high degree of public awareness of the main consequences of the scarcity of water and the need of fostering efficient use of water resources. Two new mechanisms for water management already under way are: a heated debate on the need and feasibility of transferring water from one basin to another, and, directly related to this proposal, the regulation of water banks1. This paper is about mWater, an agent-based electronic market of water rights. Our focus is on demand and, in particular, on the type of regulatory and market mechanisms that foster an efficient use of water while preventing conflicts. In this work we present the regulated environment which is implemented as an Electronic Institution for simulating water-right markets in order to evaluate the impacts of different regulations on the market behavior

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There is a chronic lack of shared application domains to test the research models and agent architectures on areas like negotiation, argumentation, trust and reputation. In this paper we introduce such a friendly testbed that we used for all such purposes. The testbed is based on the Diplomacy Game due to its lack of random moves and because of the essential role that negotiation and the relationships between the players play in the game. The testbed may also profit from the existence of a community of bot developers and a large number of human players that would provide data for our experiments. We offer the infrastructure and make it freely available to the MAS community.

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In this paper we describe a prototype for a generic platform to support actual on-line mediation. The immediate purpose of the prototype is to provide working examples of the computer artifacts that may be implemented to support current and foreseeable mediation practices. The ultimate objective, however, is to facilitate the deployment of appropriate ODR environments. The proposal is motivated by the production of a "White Book on Mediation in Catalonia" commissioned by the Catalan Government. This paper illustrates how different ODR processes --like negotiation protocols of different types, arbitration or non-intrusive mediation-- plus the preparatory and ancillary subprocesses --like convening the parties, caucuses, anonymous proposal registration, mediator selection-- may be specified and then assembled into more or less elaborate mediation support systems tailored to the needs and preferences of each mediation provider. This proposal is based on the notion of electronic institution and is being implemented using the IIIA's EIDE platform.

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