Toward a theory of honesty and trust among communicating autonomous agents

Abstract

This article outlines, through a number of examples, a method that can be used by autonomous agents to decide among potential messages to send to other agents, without having to assume that a message must be truthful and that it must be believed by the hearer. The main idea is that communicative behavior of autonomous agents is guided by the principle of economic rationality, whereby agents transmit messages to increase the effectiveness of interaction measured by their expected utilities. We are using a recursive, decision-theoretic formalism that allows agents to model each other and to infer the impact of a message on its recipient. The recursion can be continued into deeper levels, and agents can model the recipient modeling the sender in an effort to assess the truthfulness of the received message. We show how our method often allows the agents to decide to communicate in spite of the possibility that the messages will not be believed. In certain situations, on the other hand, our method shows that the possibility of the hearer not believing what it hears makes communication useless. Our method thus provides the rudiments of a theory of how honesty and trust could emerge through rational, selfish behavior.