Enforcing Honest Behavior in Agent Economies

Given the recent explosion of the Internet, the trade of information goods and services may become the dominant form of commerce in the future global economy. Software agents, or semi-autonomous computer programs that run with little or no user input, may play a significant role in this information economy, perhaps even as direct participants in economic transactions. Such software agents might trade different types of information commodities with other software agents in return for electronic currency, ultimately to benefit their human user. This thesis addresses several problems that must be resolved before such an economy of software agents could become a reality, and offers some potential solutions to these problems. We consider a number of different electronic payment systems in the context of an agent economy, and then describe the design and implementation of an electronic payment system in Magenta, a fully open and extensible multi-agent platform developed at IBM Research. We discuss a number of different mechanisms that could protect consumers from dishonest merchants, such as reputation, escrow, and certification mechanisms; escrow and reputation mechanisms are also implemented in Magenta. Thesis Supervisor: Jeffrey 0. Kephart Title: Manager, Agents and Emergent Phenomena, IBM Research Thesis Supervisor: Barbara Liskov Title: Ford Professor of Engineering