Guaranteeing Properties for E-commerce Systems

Agents in an electronic commerce system act on behalf of potentially competing individuals and organisations. It is proposed that such systems will be used in scenarios where legally binding contracts are made or money is exchanged by the agents on behalf of their owners. Agent owners may be reluctant to delegate tasks involving uncertain and possibly detrimental outcomes to an agent without assurances about the system’s properties. It may be a requirement, for example, that an agent cannot profit from lying to its peers. This paper demonstrates how solutions from game theory together with computing theories can be used to publicly specify rules and prove desirable properties for agent systems. This has the potential to increase the range of applications in which agent owners may be willing to delegate to their embedded counterparts.