Towards Reputation Enhanced Electronic Negotiations for Service Oriented Computing

Electronic commerce mechanisms are mainly investigated in two independent research areas: service-oriented computing (SOC) and multi-agent systems. The former as a means to deliver electronic services of various granularity and the latter as a testbed of electronic negotiation mechanisms. However, both research areas heavily rely on each other. On the one hand, service-oriented architectures need to support dynamic cooperation, negotiation, and adaptive interactions between offered services. On the other hand SOC represents a promising application for software agent technologies as a paradigm for electronic negotiations which future service economies will more and more rely on. Apart from the high flexibility and efficiency of such service economies, problems similar to the ones in real world economies will arise, such as the trusting problem between market participants. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of reputation concepts in different negotiation protocols for electronic service economies. Based on social science findings we deduct hypotheses on the applicability of such mechanisms in various electronic negotiation settings.