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Gossip-based aggregation of trust in decentralized reputation systems

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Abstract

Decentralized Reputation Systems have recently emerged as a prominent method of establishing trust among self-interested agents in online environments. A key issue is the efficient aggregation of data in the system; several approaches have been proposed, but they are plagued by major shortcomings. We put forward a novel, decentralized data management scheme grounded in gossip-based algorithms. Rumor mongering is known to possess algorithmic advantages, and indeed, our framework inherits many of their salient features: scalability, robustness, a global perspective, and simplicity. We demonstrate that our scheme motivates agents to maintain a very high reputation, by showing that the higher an agent’s reputation is above the threshold set by its peers, the more transactions it would be able to complete within a certain time unit. We analyze the relation between the amount by which an agent’s average reputation exceeds the threshold and the time required to close a deal. This analysis is carried out both theoretically, and empirically through a simulation system called GossipTrustSim. Finally, we show that our approach is inherently impervious to certain kinds of attacks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Computer Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Yoram Bachrach, Ariel Parnes & Jeffrey S. Rosenschein

  2. Microsoft Israel R&D Center, Herzeliya, Israel

    Ariel D. Procaccia

Authors
  1. Yoram Bachrach
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  2. Ariel Parnes
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  3. Ariel D. Procaccia
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  4. Jeffrey S. Rosenschein
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ariel D. Procaccia.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this article appeared in the proceedings of IJCAI 2007.

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Bachrach, Y., Parnes, A., Procaccia, A.D. et al. Gossip-based aggregation of trust in decentralized reputation systems. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 19, 153–172 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-008-9073-6

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