Designing robust, open electronic marketplaces of contract net agents

The creation of open agent-mediated electronic marketplaces requires new architectures, capable of coping with unreliable computational and network infrastructures, limited trust among independently developed agents, and the possibility of systemic failures. In analogy with civil human societies, open marketplaces will benefit from the introduction of appropriate electronic social institutions, whose role will be to help guarantee stability and efficiency in the face of these challenges. This paper presents a research methodology for designing and evaluating such electronic social institutions. It also describes how the methodology is currently being applied in order to design and evaluate robust open architectures for agent-mediated marketplaces based on the contract net protocol.