Contract cheating will erode trust in science

Trust and Cheating Trust and Cheating

When we take a cab we may feel cheated if the driver takes an unnecessarily long route despite the lack of a contract or promise to take the shortest possible path. Is our decision to take the cab affected by our belief that we may end up feeling cheated? Is the behavior of the driver affected by his beliefs about what we consider cheating? We address these questions in the context of a trust g...

Cheating in the Trust Game

A large experimental literature has investigated the determinants of trust using variants of the so called trust game. However, a lot of ambiguity remains regarding the definition of what one is trusting: one extreme view is that since there are no explicit promises or guarantees made in the trust game, cheating is not defined and therefore trust is not implied. We address this concern by askin...

Trust and Cheating

When we take a cab we may feel cheated if the driver takes an unnecessarily long route despite the lack of a contract or promise to take the shortest possible path. Is the behavior of the driver affected by beliefs about our cheating notions, and where do his beliefs come from? For that matter, where do our cheating notions come from, and how do they color our own decisions? We address these qu...

MARINE AND COASTAL SCIENCE: Will Ocean Acidification Erode the Base of the Food Web?

Trust-based Contract Nets

In this paper we use a contract net protocol in order to compare various delegation strategies. We have implemented some different agents, having a set of tasks to delegate (or to perform by themselves); the tasks are performed by the agents in a dynamic environment, that can help or worse their activity. The agent rely upon different strategies in order to choose whom to delegate. We implement...