Post date: 08-Feb-2014 14:48:13
Upcoming paper (to be presented at HotSpot 2014, Grenoble, April 12 2014)
Towards a theory of honesty
M. Bartoletti, A. Scalas, and R. Zunino
Abstract. In contract-oriented systems, distributed agents may advertise and stipulate contracts, and interact via contract-based sessions. However, differently to most other approaches to distributed agents, they are not assumed to always keep their promises.
The honesty property characterises those agents who always respect their contracts, in all possible execution contexts. This property is quite strong, because it requires that an agent is capable of fulfilling her obligations also when the context plays against her. We discuss some work in progress about weaker notions of honesty (which however still guarantee safe interactions among agents),
and their relation with different cases of inter-session dependencies.
Our final goal is a theory for blame shifting, allowing to determine when a (not-strictly-honest) agent can blame other (dishonest) agents for her contractual violations.