Organized Anonymous Agents

Anonymity can be of great importance in distributed agent applications such as e-commerce & auctions. This paper proposes and analyzes a new approach for organized anonymity of agents based on the use of pseudonyms. A novel naming scheme is presented that can be used by agent platforms to provide automatic anonymity for all agents on its platform, or, alternatively, to provide anonymity on demand. The paper also introduces a new technique, based on the use of handles, that can be fully integrated in an agent platform. Performance measures for an anonymity service implemented for the AgentScape platform provides some insight in the overhead involved.