Helping Agents on Selecting Their Future Partners

In heterogeneous and open multi-agent systems the selection of future partners have been an issue that reputation systems are trying to solve. However, nowadays reputation systems propose the selection of such partners based solely on the reputation the partners have as service providers. In this paper we argue that an agent that intends to participate in future interactions may concern not only about the quality of the service it will provide, but also about how its partner evaluates its behavior. The evaluation the partner does about its behavior may be spread to other agents that will use it when selecting their future partners. In this context, this paper proposes three mechanisms able (i) to help an agent to identify how its possible future partner evaluates the behavior of its colleagues, (ii) to estimate the reputation value the agent using the approach will probably receive after interacting with such future partner, and (iii) to put together the reputation value of the possible future partner as a service provider and the estimated reputation value to be able to decide to select or not the agent as a future partner. The approach was evaluated by using an e-commerce scenario.