A Dynamic Agents’ Behavior Model for Computational Trust

The development of computational trust models is growing in attention in the community of multi-agent systems and these models are currently seen as of extreme importance in social networks, electronic business and grid computing, among others. However, one of the biggest limitations in validating the existing computational trust models is the absence of realistic models of the behavior of agents. In fact, most of the work done in this area assumes that agents behave following simple and static probabilistic models. In this paper, we present a formal model of behavior of business agents that entail in inter-organizational exchanges, taking as basis diverse literature on socio-economic theories. With this model, we empirically show that some of the computational trust approaches which are more cited in the literature are not able to capture the temporal dynamics in the behavior of the business agents. Based on the results obtained from this study, we enumerate different properties that must be present in computational trust models in order to couple with realistic agents’ behavior.