Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5185

84 A. Wierzbicki and R. Nielek
Emergence hypothesis holds in several cases, but not universally; therefore, we
have investigated the sensitivity of fairness emergence to various factors that
influence the quality of the reputation system.
4.1 Fairness Emergence in the Long Term
The first studied effect has been the emergence of fairness in the long term. In
the simulation experiment, we have measured the Gini coefficient and have run
the simulation until the Gini coefficient stabilized. This experiment has been
repeated using three scenarios: in the first one, the agents did not use any reputation
system, but selected partners for transactions randomly. In the second
experiment, the reputation system was used, but agents submitted negative reports
with the probability of 0.2. In the third experiment, negative reports have
always been submitted.
The results of the three experiments are shown on Figure 1. The Figure plots
the average Gini coefficient of honest agents from 50 simulation runs against
the number of turns of the simulation. It can be seen that when agents do
not use the reputation system, the Gini coefficient stabilizes for a value that is
almost twice larger than the value of Gini that is obtained when reputation is
used. Furthermore, there is a clear effect of increasing the frequency of negative
feedbacks: the Gini coefficient decreases faster and stabilizes at a lower value
when p− rep = 1 . The initial growth of the Gini coefficient from 0 is due to the
fact that at the beginning of the simulation, the distribution of honest agent
utilities is equal (during the warm-up stage, utilities of agents are not recorded.
All agents start with a zero utility after warm-up completes.)
The result of this experiment seems to be a confirmation of the FE hypothesis.
The distributions of honest agents’ utilities have a lower Gini coefficient (and
a higher total sum of utilities) when the reputation system is used. Yet, the
problem here is that in realistic auction systems, most agents only have a small
Fig. 1. Fairness Emergence in the long term