Objective trust-based agents: Trust and trustworthiness in a multi-agent trading society

In this paper we develop a notion of “objective trust” for Software Agents, that is trust of, or between, agents based on actual experiences between those agents. Experiential objective trust allows agents to make decisions about how to select other agents when a choice has to be made. We introduce a mechanism for such an “objective Trust-Based Agent” (oTB-Agent). The trust one agent places in another is dynamic, updated on the basis of each experience. We summarise experimental results obtained from a simulated trading environment