Abstract
An agent’s assessment of its trust in another agent
is commonly taken to be a measure of the reliability/predictability of the latter’s actions. It is based
on the trustor’s past observations of the behaviour
of the trustee and requires no knowledge of the
inner-workings of the trustee. However, in situations that are new or unfamiliar, past observations
are of little help in assessing trust. In such cases,
knowledge about the trustee can help. A particular type of knowledge is that of values - things that
are important to the trustor and the trustee. In this
paper, based on the premise that the more values
two agents share, the more they should trust one
another, we propose a simple approach to trust assessment between agents based on values, taking
into account if agents trust cautiously or boldly, and
if they depend on others in carrying out a task