Establishing Trust in Multiagent Environments: Realizing the Comprehensive Trust Management Dream

In this paper, we present a framework for enabling agents in multiagent systems to engender trust from the other agents in the environment. Opposite to the aims of most existing trust modelling research, our algorithms serve to guide the actions of trustees (instead of trustors). Our approach requires trustees to predict the types of the trustors, modifying their behaviour when predictions prove to be inaccurate. The primary aim of trustees is to acquire high levels of trust, of value for future interactions with trustors. Illustrated in the context of electronic marketplaces, we offer a validation of our approach in comparison with competing algorithms that drive the behaviour of trustees which are more focused on immediate rewards. Through simulations, we are able to demonstrate important gains achieved by our approach. As such, we offer an important first step in addressing a novel challenge for trust modelling, articulating how trust may be successfully engendered.