Accountable individual trust from group reputations in multi-agent systems

Studies of reputation and trust in multi-agent systems so far have been concentrated on individual reputation. In many applications, agents need to form groups to provide services. Reputations of agent groups and individuals are mutually influenced due to the fact that they can either use these reputation of their groups or individuals to establish interactions. In multi-agent systems research, most reputation models have been constructed to capture individual reputation based on direct evidence. This paper proposes a computational model for inferring reputations and contributions of members in agent groups. We argue that the proposed model can be used as an estimation for individual reputation when such information is not available, and is suitable for distributed environments.