A Deceit-Tolerant Negotiation Model for Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce

In application of agent mediated electronic commerce, there exist many situations where agents have to tolerate insecurity and negotiate with deceit-possible agents. This paper presents DTAN model, a novel negotiation model that agents can use to negotiate in a deceit-tolerant manner to get maximal profit even in an unsecured negotiation process. Unlike current approaches to deception in e-commerce, the DTAN model does not mainly focus on ensuring the trustworthiness of partners before negotiation or terminating negotiation on detecting deception, but how to carry on automated negotiations with suspicious agents, take the risk of unpredictable deceits under control, and attain to good performance in an uncertain environment. Time and belief factors are considered in the model. Due to its deceit-tolerant property, DTAN model is robust and more applicable in open e-commerce systems. Moreover, an applied DTAN model is also presented in this paper.