Stable Strategies for Sharing Information among Agents

Information sharing is important for different goals, such as sharing reputations of sellers among potential buyers, load balancing, solving technical problems, etc. In the short run, providing information as a response to queries is often unbene cial. In the long run, mechanisms that enable bene cial stable strategies for information exchange can be found. This paper presents such mechanisms and speci es under which conditions it is benecial to the agents to answer queries. We analyze a model of repeated encounters in which two agents ask each other queries over time. We present different strategies that enable information exchange, and compare them according to the expected utility for the agents, and the conditions required for the cooperative equilibrium to exist. This material is baseduponwork supported in part by the NSF underGrantNo. IIS-9820657. Rina Azoulay-Schwartz is supported in part by the IsraeliMinistry of Science.