I-TRUST: investigating trust between users and agents in a multi-agent portfolio management system

摘要

There is considerable research investigating trust among agents in multi-agent systems. However, the issue of trust between agents and users has rarely been reported in the literature. In this paper, we describe our experiences with I-TRUST, where trust is introduced as a relationship between clients and broker agents in terms of the amount of money clients are willing to give to these agents to invest on their behalf. The goals of broker agents are not only to maximize total revenue subject to clients’ risk preference, but also to reinforce trust with their clients. To achieve this, broker agents must first elicit user models both explicitly through questionnaires and implicitly through three games. Then based on the initial user models, a broker agent will learn to invest and later update user models when necessary. From the three experiments conducted in this study, we found that the controllability of a client towards the autonomous system plays a significant role for trust building.