An incentive compatible reputation mechanism

Traditional centralized approaches to security are difficult to apply to large, distributed marketplaces in which software agents operate. Developing a notion of trust that is based on the reputation of agents can provide a softer notion of security that is sufficient for many multi-agent applications. We address the issue of incentive-compatibility (i.e. how to make it optimal for agents to share reputation information truthfully), by introducing a side-payment scheme, organized through a set of broker agents, that makes it rational for software agents to truthfully share the reputation information they have acquired in their past experience. We also show how to use a cryptographic mechanism to protect the integrity of reputation information and to achieve a tight bounding between the identity and reputation of an agent.