Advertising Games for Web Services

In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS-03), pp. 93–109, Springer-Verlag LNCS Series. c © 2003 by Springer-Verlag. We advance and discuss a framework suitable to study theoretical implications and practical impact of language evolution and lexicon sharing in an open distributed multi-agent system. In our approach, the assumption of autonomy plays a key role to preserve the opportunity for the agents of local encoding of meanings. We consider the application scenario of Web services, where we conceive the problem of advertisement as a matter of sharing a denotational language. We provide a precise formulation of the agents’ behavior within a game-theoretical setting. As an important consequence of our “advertising games,” we interpret the problem of knowledge interoperability and management in the light of evolutionary dynamics and learning in games. Our methodology is inspired by work in natural language semantics and “language games.”