Effects of lying in reputation-based multi-agent systems

As an increasing number of tasks on the Internet become automated using autonomous agents, it will become increasingly important for these agents to be able to discern which agents can be trusted and which cannot. This is especially true where interacting agents may have divergent goals, an example being peer to peer applications. Passing on reputation information about other agents is a strong way to encourage cooperation. This paper points out weaknesses in both a general reputation scheme as well as a framework which was previously proposed. These weaknesses could leave the door open for exploitation by malicious agents