A Unified Negotiation Protocol (UNP) is developed that can be used in all types of encounters. It is shown that in certain borderline cooperative situations, a partial cooperative agreement (i.e., one that does not achieve all agents' goals) might be preferred by all agents, even though there exists a rational agreement that would achieve all their goals.
Finally, we analyze cases where agents have incomplete information on the goals and worth of other agents. First we consider the case where agents' goals are private information, and we analyze what goal declaration strategies the agents might adopt to increase their utility. Then, we consider the situation where the agents' goals (and therefore stand-alone costs) are common knowledge, but the worth they attach to their goals is private information. We introduce two mechanisms, one 'strict', the other 'tolerant', and analyze their affects on the stability and efficiency of negotiation outcomes. 10/29/96
We describe our work in progress of constructing a workbench to run simulations of electronic markets. By examining the success of different security mechanisms to avoid maliciously behaving actors we hope to gain insight into how to create electronic markets. The idea of creating reputations for the participants is discussed. Finally some legal aspects on using social control and reputation as security mechanisms are discussed. 4/17/96
Not disqualifying agents from doing useful work for you on the grounds that you have no previous experience from them facilitates the introduction of new agents into the market, since trusting the sender is less crucial.
The paper contains a discussion on the security approach taken in most of today's agent systems and how security is enforced by Intrusion Detection Systems. We give a rationale for using an interactive Personal Security Assistant as an aid for detecting malicious agents visiting end-user agent environments and sketch the architecture and design criteria of such an assistant. We discuss how malicious programs could be identified and mention some preliminary experiments with Java-applets. 4/17/96