In this chapter we elaborate on the specification and exploitation
of a software agent-based Electronic Institution, embedding both a
Normative Environment and a Computational Trust service which, when
used in tandem, lead to an enhanced process of selection of potential
business partners and enable automatic contract negotiation. We introduce
a formalization of a Normative Environment, which accommodates the
establishment of e-contracts and provides a contract monitoring facility.
Contracts are established and enacted by contractual partners previously
selected through an automatic negotiation process. While monitoring
contracts at run-time, the Normative Environment makes use of a reporting
mechanism to inform relevant contract enactment events to interested parties.
In our work, we benefit from this reporting function by exploiting it
as an input to a computational trust mechanism. We also present the
built-in Computational Trust service, a key element of the Electronic
Institution. This service includes two main components: the Contractual
Evidences Manager, which generates contractual evidences from contract
enactment events; and the Trust Aggregation Engine, a situation-aware trust
aggregator that takes into account properties of the dynamics of trust and
the contractual context under assessment. We then discuss and propose
the potential exploitation of trustworthiness estimations in B2B negotiation
processes, including the stages of preselection of partners and contract
drafting. Using our computational trust approach, we have implemented a
trust-based preselection mechanism included in an agent-based automatic
negotiation process. We performed an empirical evaluation of our proposal,
by running a set of experiments in an experimental setting enriched with
realistic negotiation elements. The results obtained allow us to point to
specific conditions under which the preselection of partners based on trust
is beneficial.
Keywords: Electronic Institution, B2B Negotiation, Automatic
Negotiation, Normative Environment, Electronic Contracts, Norms,
Contract Drafting, Computational Trust, Trust and Contrating, Multi-agent
Systems.
