An Adaptive Reputation Model for VOs

Because Virtual Organisations (VOs) essentially involve cooperating two or more organisations or agents to pursue a common objective, satisfactory cooperation is vital to their success. However, before an agent made the decision to go ahead with the VO, it needs to be confident that the rest of the potential partners will be act cooperatively. We show that reputation is a basic ingredient in the formation of VOs. Reputation is computed using an adaptive algorithm, so agents can learn and adapt their reputation models of their partners according to their recent behaviour. Our approach is especially powerful if the agent participates in a VO in which the members can change their behaviour to exploit their partners. The reputation model presented in this paper deals with the questions of deception and fraud that have been ignored in current models of VO formation.