An Investigation of Sharing Seller Reputation among Buyers in Agent-Based Markets

Abstract

Our work investigates the effects of knowledge sharing among buyer agents in an electronic market, where the shared knowledge is the reputation of seller agents. Each buyer agent independently models a seller after having purchased goods from the seller and, upon request, shares this knowledge with friends. We investigated if having a larger number of friends enables buyers to find good quality low priced sellers in the market more rapidly and also if there is a point of diminishing returns, beyond which increasing the number of friends will not have any positive effects. Our results show that, by sharing information with friends, the buyers are able to identify good sellers earlier. However the marginal gain of having more friends decreases as the number of friends increases.