Assistance: Is it Better to Receive Than to Give?

Assistance, or service, is becoming increasingly important in the information economy, but few people have studied it. MÆDEN provides a testbed for studying service using a variety of agent architectures. We are developing GARCIA, an architecture that supports interactions between agents and where one agent can provides assistance to another that is in need of help. We present several recent empirical studies that go beyond previous work with the intent of identifying fundamental features