Proving properties of open agent systems

Abstract

In an open agent system the constituent agents are developed and owned by different individuals or organisations who may have conflicting interests. Hence the internals (i.e. program and state) of agents are not public and so notions of trust and deception are relevant. It is proposed that such systems will be used in scenarios where legally binding contracts are made and money is exchanged by the agents on behalf of their owners. Not surprisingly, agent owners can be expected to be reluctant to delegate tasks involving potentially detrimental outcomes to an agent unless they can be assured that the system has certain desirable properties. It may be a requirement, for example, that an agent cannot profit from lying to its peers. Solutions from game theory and economics [1] allow us to design mechanisms for interactions (a set of public rules governing an interaction) which provide incentives for participants to behave as we desire, for example to tell the truth; mechanisms can be designed to have properties such as individual rationality, incentive compatibility and stability. Having chosen a suitable mechanism, we can implement it for an agent system as a protocol and prove that these properties hold for the agent system.