=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1569/paper3 |storemode=property |title=Valorizing Prejudice in MAS: A Computational Model |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1569/paper3.pdf |volume=Vol-1569 |authors=Rino Falcone,Alessandro Sapienza,Cristiano Castelfranchi |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/atal/FalconeSC15 }} ==Valorizing Prejudice in MAS: A Computational Model== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1569/paper3.pdf
                                    Valorizing Prejudice in MAS:
                                      A Computational Model

             Rino Falcone                              Alessandro Sapienza                          Cristiano Castelfranchi
                ISTC-CNR                                        ISTC-CNR                                      ISTC-CNR
                Rome, Italy                                     Rome, Italy                                   Rome, Italy
      rino.falcone@istc.cnr.it                 alessandro.sapienza@istc.cnr.it cristiano.castelfranchi@istc.cnr.it



ABSTRACT                                                                1.        INTRODUCTION
In MAS studies on Trust building and dynamics the role of               In MultiAgent Systems (MAS) and Online Social Networks
direct/personal experience and of recommendations and reputation        (OSN) studies on Trust building and dynamics the role of
is proportionally overrated; while the importance of inferential        direct/personal experience and of recommendations and reputation
processes in deriving the evaluation of trustees’ trustworthiness is    (although important) is proportionally overrated; while the
underestimated and not exploited.                                       importance of inferential processes in deriving the evaluation of
                                                                        trustee's trustworthiness is underestimated and not sufficiently
In this paper we focus on the importance of generalized
                                                                        exploited (a part from the so called “transitivity”, which is also,
knowledge: agents' categories. The cognitive advantage of               very often, wrongly founded).
generalized knowledge can be synthesized in this claim: "It allows
us to know a lot about something/somebody we do not directly            In particular, generalization and instantiation from classes and
know". At a social level this means that I can know a lot of things     categories [8], and analogical reasoning (from task to task and
on people that I never met; it is social "prejudice" with its good      from agent to agent) really should receive much more attention. In
side and fundamental contribution to social exchange. In this           this paper we focus on the importance of generalized knowledge:
study we experimentally inquire the role played by categories'          agents' categories. The cognitive advantage of generalized
reputation with respect to the reputation and opinion on single         knowledge (building classes, prototypes, categories, etc.), can be
agents: when it is better to rely on the first ones and when are        synthesized in this obvious claim: "It allows us to know a lot
more reliable the second ones. Our claim is that: the larger the        about something/somebody we do not directly know" (for
population and the ignorance about the trustworthiness of each          example, I never saw Mary's dog, but - since it is a dog - I know
individual (as it happens in an open world) the more precious the       hundreds of things about it).
role of trust in categories.
                                                                        At a social level this means that I can know a lot of things on
This powerful inferential device has to be strongly present in          people that I never met; it is social "prejudice" with its good side
WEB societies supported by MAS.                                         and fundamental contribution to social exchange. How can I trust
                                                                        (for drugs prescription) a medical doctor that I never met before
Categories and Subject Descriptors                                      and nobody of my friends knows? Because he is a doctor!
I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]      :     Distributed   Artificial    Of course we are underlining the positive aspects of generalized
Intelligence - multiagent systems                                       knowledge, its essential role for having information on people
                                                                        never met before and about whom no one gave testimony. The
General Terms                                                           more rich and accurate this knowledge is, the more it is useful. It
                                                                        offers huge opportunity both for realizing productive cooperation
Experimentation, Human Factors, Reliability, Theory                     and for avoiding risky interactions. The problem is when the
                                                                        uncertainty about the features of the categories is too large or it is
Keywords                                                                too wide the variability of the performers within them. In our
Trust and reputation, Cognitive models, Social simulation               culture we attribute a negative sense to the concept of prejudice,
                                                                        and this because we want underline how generalized knowledge
                                                                        can produce unjust judgments against individuals (or groups)
                                                                        when superficially applied (or worst, on the basis of precise
                                                                        discriminatory intents). Here we want rather point out the positive
                                                                        aspects of the prejudice concept.
                                                                        In this study we intend to explain and experimentally show the
                                                                        advantage of trust evaluation based on classes' reputation with
                                                                        respect to the reputation and opinion on single potential trustees
                                                                        (partners). In an open world or in a broad population how can we
                                                                        have sufficient direct or reported experience on everybody? The
                                                                        quantity of potential trustees in that population or net that might
                                                                        be excellent partners but that nobody knows enough can be high.
Our claim is that: the larger the population and the ignorance           which contributes are more important in the aggregation phase
about the trustworthiness of each individual the more precious the       [15][19]. For instance, in [7] authors provide a system able to
role of trust in categories. If I know (through signals, marks,          recommend to users group that they could join in Online Social
declaration, ...) the class of a given guy/agent I can have a reliable   Network. Here it is introduced the concepts of compactness of a
opinion of its trustworthiness derived from its class-membership.        social group, defined as the weighted mean of the two dimensions
It is clear that the advantages of such cognitive power provided by      of similarity and trust.
categories and prejudices does not only depend on                        Even in [12] authors present a clustering-based recommender
recommendation and reputation about categories. We can                   system that exploits both similarity and trust, generating two
personally build - by generalization - our evaluation of a given         different cluster views and combining them to obtain better
category from our direct experience with its members (this is fact       results.
happens in our experiments for the agents that later have to
propagate their recommendation about). However, in this                  Another example is [6] where authors use information regarding
simulation we have in the trustor (which has to decide whom rely         social friendships in order to provide users with more accurate
on) only a prejudice based on recommendations about that                 suggestions and rankings on items of their interest.
category and not its personal experience.                                A classical decentralized approach is referral systems [21], where
                                                                         agents adaptively give referrals to one another.
After a certain degree on direct experiences and circulation of
recommendations, the performance of the evaluation based on              Information sources come into play in FIRE [13], a trust and
classes will perform better; and in certain cases there will be no       reputation model that use them to produce a comprehensive
alternative at all: we do not have any evaluation on that                assessment of an agent’s likely performance. Here authors take
individual, a part from its category; either we work on inferential      into account open MAS, where agents continuously enter and
instantiation of trustworthiness or we loose a lot of potential          leave the system. Specifically, FIRE exploits interaction trust,
partners. This powerful inferential device has to be strongly            role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation to
present in WEB societies supported by MAS. We simplify here              provide trust metrics.
the problem of the generalization process, of how to form                The described solutions are quite similar to our work, although we
judgement about groups, classes, etc. by putting aside for example       contextualized this problem to information sources. However we
inference from other classes (higher or sub); we build opinion           do not investigate recommendations with just the aim of
(and then its transmission) about classes on the bases of                suggesting a particular trustee, but also for inquiring categories’
experience with a number of subjects of a given class.                   recommendations.
First of all, we want to clarify that here we are not interested in
steretypes, but in categories. We define steretypes as the set of
features that, in a given culture/opinion, characterize and
                                                                         2.  RECOMMENDATION AND
distinguish that specific group of people.                               REPUTATION: DEFINITIONS
Knowing the stereotype of an agent could be expensive and time           Let us consider a set of agents Ag1, ..., Agn in a given world (for
consuming. Here we are just interested in the fact that an agent         example a social network). We consider that each agent in this
belongs to a category: it has not to be a costly process and the         world could have trust relationships with anyone else. On the
recognition must be well discriminative and not-cheating. There          basis of these interactions the agents can evaluate the trust degree
should be visible and reliable "signals" of that membership. In          of their partners, so building their judgments about the
fact, the usefulness of categories, groups, roles, etc. makes            trustworthiness of the agents with whom they interacted in the
fundamental the role of the signs for recognizing or inferring the       past.
category of a given agent. That's why in social life are so              The possibility to access to these judgements, through
important coats, uniforms, titles, badges, diplomas, etc. and it is      recommendations, is one of the main sources for trusting agents
crucial their exhibition and the assurance of their authenticity         outside the circle of closer friends. Exactly for this reason
(and, on the other side, the ability to falsify and deceive). In this    recommendation and reputation are the more studied and diffused
preliminary model and simulation let us put aside this crucial           tools in the trust domain [16].
issue of indirect competence and reliability signaling; let us           We define
assume that the membership to a given class or category is true
and transparent: the category of a given agent is public, common         Re cx, y,z (τ )                                               (1)
knowledge.
Differently from [2][11][18], in this work we do not address the         where    x, y, z ∈ { Ag1 , Ag2 ,...., Agn } , we call D the
problem of learning categorical knowledge and we assum that the
                                                                         specific domain: D ≡ { Ag1 , Ag2 ,...., Agn }
categorizzation process is objective.
Similarly to [3], we give agents the possibility to recommend            and	
   0 ≤ Re c x, y,z (τ ) ≤ 1
categories and this is the key point of this paper.
                                                                         τ, as established in the trust model of [4], is the task on which the
In the majority of the cases available in the literature, the concept    recommender expresses the evaluation about y.
of recommendation is used concerning recommender systems [1].
These ones can be realized using both past experience (content-          In words: Re c x, y,z (τ ) is the value of x’s recommendation
based RS) [14] or collaborative filtering, in which the contribute       about y performing the task τ, where z is the agent receiving this
of single agents/users is used to provide group recommendations          recommendation. In this paper, for sake of simplicity, we do not
to other agents/users.                                                   introduce any correlation/influence between the value of the
Focusing on collaborative filtering, the concepts of similarity and      recommendations and the kind of the agent receiving it: the value
trust are often exploited (together or separately) to determine
of the recommendation does not depend from the agent to whom
                                                                                           where x ∈ { Ag1 , Ag2 ,...., Agn } and
it is communicated.
So (1) represents the basic expression for recommendation.                                    Cy ⊆ { Ag1 , Ag2 ,...., Agn } ,
We can also define a more complex expression                                         of       0 ≤ Re cx,Cy,z (τ ) ≤ 1
recommendation, a sort of average recommendation:
  Agn                                                                                      In words:	
   Re c x,Cy,z (τ ) 	
   is the value of x’s recommendation
 ∑ Re c          x,y,z    (τ ) / n                                             (2)         about the agents included in category Cy when they perform the
                                                                                           task τ, (as usual z is the agent receiving this recommendation).
x=Ag1
                                                                                           We again define a more complex expression of recommendation,
in which all the agents in the domain express their individual                             a sort of average recommendation:
recommendation on the agent y with respect the task	
   τ	
   and the
total value is divided by the number of agents.                                                    Agn

We consider the expression (2) as the reputation of the agent y                                   ∑ Re c        x,Cy,z   (τ ) / n                              (6)
with respect to the task	
  τ	
  in the domain D.                                                 x=Ag1

Of course the reputation concept is more complex than the                                  in which all the agents in the domain express their individual
simplified version here introduced [5][17].                                                recommendation on the category Cy with respect the task	
  τ	
  and the
It is in fact the value that would emerge in the case in which we                          total value is divided by the number of agents.
receive from each agent in the world its recommendation about y                            We consider the expression (6) as the reputation of the category
(considering each agent as equally reliable).                                              Cy with respect the task τ	
  in the domain D.
In the case in which an agent has to be recommended not only on                            Now we extend to the categories, in particular to Cy, the
one task but on a set of tasks	
  (τ1	
  ,	
  ...,	
  τk),	
  we could define instead of   recommendations on a set of tasks	
  (τ1, ...,τk):
(1) and (2) the following expressions:
                                                                                                   k
  k

∑ Re c                  (τ i ) / k                                             (3)
                                                                                              ∑ Re c          x,Cy,z   (τ i ) / k
               x, y,z                                                                             i=1
 i=1                                                                                                          (7)
that represents the x’s recommendation about y performing the set                          that represents the value of x’s recommendation about the agents
of tasks (τ1,...,τk), where z is the agent receiving this                                  included in category Cy when they perform the set of tasks
recommendation.                                                                            (τ1,...,τk).
Imagine having to assign a meta-task (composed of a set of task)                           Finally, we define:
to one of several agents. In this case the information given from
                                                                                                  Agn     k
the formula (3) could be useful for selecting on average (with
respect to the tasks) the more performative one.                                                  ∑ ∑ Re c              x,Cy,z   (τ i ) / nk
                                                                                                  x=Ag1   i=1
  Agn      k
                                                                                                              (8)
 ∑ ∑ Re c                 x, y,z   (τ i ) / nk                                 (4)
                                                                                           that represents the value of the reputation of the category Cy (of
x=Ag1     i=1
                                                                                           all the agents y included in Cy) with respect the set of tasks
that represents a sort of average recommendation from the set of                           (τ1,...,τk), in the domain D.	
  
agents in D, about y performing the set of tasks (τ1 , ..., τk). We
consider the expression (4) as the reputation of the agent y with                          	
  
respect the set of tasks (τ1 , ...,τk), in the domain D.                                   2.2                Definitions of Interest for this Work
Having to assign the meta-task proposed above, the information                             In this paper we are in particular interested in the case in which z
given from the formula (4) could be useful for selecting on                                (a new agent introduced in the world) asks for recommendation to
average (with respect to both the tasks and the agents) the more                           x ( x ∈ D ) about an agent belonging to its domain D (the set of
performative one.
                                                                                           all the agents in the world) for performing the task	
   τ.	
  x will select
                                                                                           the best evaluated	
  y,	
  with	
   y ∈ Dx on the basis of formula:
2.1            Using Categories                                                               max y∈Dx (Re cx, y,z (τ ))
As described above, an interesting approach for evaluating agents
is to classify them in specific categories already pre-judged/rated                                           (9)
and as a consequence to do inherit to the agents the properties of
their own categories.                                                                      where Dx ≡ { Ag1 , Ag2 ,...., Agm } , Dx includes all the

So we can introduce also the recommendations about categories,                             agents evaluated by x. They are a subset of D: Dx ⊆ D .
not just about agents (we discuss elsewhere how these                                      In general D and Dx are different because x does not necessarily
recommendations are formed). In this sense we define:                                      know (has interacted with) all the agents in D.
Re cx,Cy,z (τ )                                                                (5)         z asks for recommendations not only to one agent, but to a set of
                                                                                           different agents: x ∈ Dz , and selects the best one on the basis of
                                                                                           the value given from the formula:
max x∈Dz (max y∈Dx (Re cx, y,z (τ )))                                      Of course, the trustworthiness of categories and trustees is
                                                                           strongly related to the kind of requested information/task. In these
           (10)                                                            simulations we use just one kind of information in which the
Dz ⊆ D , z could ask to all the agents in the world or to a                categories A, B, C and D have 80, 60, 40 and 20% of average
                                                                           value of trustworthiness respectively. The uncertainty value is
defined subset of it (see later).
                                                                           fixed to 20% for all of them.
We are also interested to the case in which z ask for
recommendations to x about a specific agents’ category for                 The simulations were carried out using two different numbers of
                                                                           trustee: 20 trustees for each category and 100 trustees for each
performing the task τ.	
  x has to select the best evaluated Cy	
  among
                                                                           category. In both cases we used just one trustor.
the different Cy x has interacted with (we are supposing that each
agent in the world D, belongs to a category Cy in the set                  3.3       How the simulations work
{Cy1 , Cy 2 ,...., Cyn } ).
                                                                           Simulations are mainly composed by two main steps that repeat
In this case we have the following formulas:                               continuously. In the first step, called exploration phase, agents
                                                                           move into the world asking to their neighbors (other agents with a
max Cy∈Dx (Re cx,Cy,z (τ ))                                     (11)       distance of less than 3 NetLogo patches) for the information P.
                                                                           Then they memorize the performance of each neighbor both as
that returns the category best evaluated from the point of view of
                                                                           individual element and as a member of its own category.
an agent (x). And
                                                                           The performance of a agent can assume just the two values 1 or 0,
max x∈Dz (max Cy∈Dx (Re cx,Cy,z (τ )))                          (12)       with 1 meaning that the agent is supporting the information P and
                                                                           0 meaning that it is opposing to P. For sake of simplicity, we
that returns the category best evaluated from the point of view of         assume that P is always true.
all the agents included in Dz .                                            We also choose to let agents move with a probability of 10%
                                                                           (each agent moves, with a probability of 10%, one patch in a
3.         COMPUTATIONAL MODEL                                             random direction) so, on the one hand we can say that the agents
3.1        NetLogo                                                         change their neighbors after each tick, but, on the other hand this
In order to realize our simulations, we exploited the software             change is quite slow and, given the number of ticks realized they
NetLogo [20]. It is an open source agent-based programming                 are not able to know all the other agents in the world, but they
environment written in Java, particularly suited for modeling              know properly just a subset of them.
natural and social phenomena.                                              We call the set of neighbors with whom agents interact in each
In NetLogo everything is an agent (also the patches that compose           tick: their neighborhood.
the world in which the other agents move) and it is possible to            The exploration phase has a variable duration, going from 100
create and model many kind of them, specifying how they relate             ticks to 1 tick. Depending on this value, agents will have a better
to each other and giving individual instructions. It is also possible      or worse knowledge of their neighborhoods.
to modify the world at run time, to further answer those "what if"         Then, in a second step (querying phase) we introduce in the
questions that pop up while investigating the models.
                                                                           world a trustor (a new agent with no knowlegde about the
It splits the programming part, in which the programmer can set            trustworthiness of other agents and categories, and that has the
up the environment of the simulation and specify the behavior of           necessity to trust someone reliable for a given task). It will select
turtles, and the visual part, in which the user can start the              a given subset of the population and it will query them. In
simulation, control it changing its parameters and see the result at       particular, the trustor will ask them for the best category and the
run time, through the view representing the world, plots and               best trustee they have experienced.
output monitors.                                                           In this way, the trustor is able to collect information about the best
Although NetLogo is an excellent instrument for simulation's               recommended category and agent.
tasks, it is devoid of adequate computational libraries to                 It is important to underline that the trustor is collecting
implement the computational model of trust on information's                information from the agents considering them as equally
sources. Then it has proved necessary to expand it with a Java             trustworthy with respect to the task of "providing
plug-in made by us, able to fill these gaps. In practice, this trust       recommendations". Otherwise it should weigh differently these
plug-in implements all the model of trust on information's sources.        recommendations.
3.2        General Setup                                                   Then it will select the nearest agent belonging to the best
In every scenario there are four general categories, called A,B,C          recommended category and it will compare it, in terms of
and D, each one characterized by:                                          objective trustworthiness, with the best recommended individual
                                                                           agent (trustee).
      1.   an average value of trustworthiness, in range [0,100];
                                                                           The possible responses are:
      2.   an uncertainty value, in range [0,100].
                                                                                 •   trustee wins: the trustee selected with individual
Those two values are exploited to generate the objective                             recommendation is better than the one selected by the
trustworthiness of each trustee, defined as the probability that,                    means of category; then this method gets one point;
concerning a specific kind of required information, the trustee will
communicate the right information.                                               •   category wins: the trustee selected by the means of
                                                                                     category is better than the one selected with individual
                                                                                     recommendation; then this method gets one point;
      •     equal result: if the difference between the two                 100           324       42      134       0,796      0,854
            trustworthiness values is not enough (it is under a
                                                                            50            252       93      155       0,799      0,831
            threshold), we consider it as indistinguishable result. In
            particular, we considered the threshold of 3%.                  25            226      140      134       0,802      0,811
These two phases are repeated 500 times.                                    10            184      179      137       0,800      0,785
3.4         Outputs                                                          5            189      191      120       0,780      0,756
In every simulation we use some different indexes to analyze its
                                                                             3            158      227      115       0,781      0,729
results:
      1.    trustee wins: number of times in which the trustee               1            133      289       78       0,754      0,649
            selected with individual recommendation is better than       all-in-one       118      266      116        0,8       0,727
            the one selected by the means of categorial
            recommendation;
      2.    category wins: number of times in which the trustee          Second scenario:
            selected by the means of categorial recommendation               •    Trustees queried by the trustor: 50%
            (the nearest agent belonging to it) is better than the one
            selected with individual recommendation;                                  Table 2. 80 trustees, 50% queried by the trustor
      3.    equal result: number of times in which the difference        Expl. Ph.       T win    C win    Equal      C Av       T Av
            between the two trustworthiness values is less than 3%;                       277       73      150       0,799      0,841
                                                                            100
      4.    trustee mean: average value of trustees’ trustworthiness
                                                                            50            227      127      146       0,801      0,811
            chosen with individual recommendation in the 500 run;
      5.    category mean: average value of the trustees’                   25            182      170      148       0,796      0,782
            trustworthiness  chosen      with the categorial                10            176      210      114       0,778      0,739
            recommendation in the 500 run.
                                                                             5            159      225      116       0,763      0,702
4.          SIMULATIONS RESULT                                               3            150      243      107       0,749      0,684
 In these simulations we present a series of scenarios with                               145      280       75       0,723      0,618
                                                                             1
different settings to show when it is more convenient to exploit
recommendations about categories rather than recommendations             all-in-one        94      313       93       0,803      0,689
about individuals, and vice versa.
We also present the “all-in-one” scenario, whose peculiarity is          Third scenario:
that the exploration lasts just 1 tick and in that tick every trustee
experiences all the others. Although this is a limit case, very              •    Trustees queried by the trustor: 25%
unlikely in the real world, it is really interesting as each trustee                  Table 3. 80 trustees, 25% queried by the trustor
has not a good knowledge of the other trustees as individual
elements (it has experienced them just one time), but it is able to      Expl. Ph.       T win    C win    Equal      C Av       T Av
get a really good knowledge of their categories, as it has                  100           248      113      139       0,803      0,824
experienced them as many times as the number of trustees for
each category. So this is an explicit case in which the                     50            218      158      124       0,790      0,787
recommendations of the trustees about categories are surely more                          193      192      115       0,779      0,755
                                                                            25
informative than the ones about individuals.
                                                                            10            159      222      119       0,756      0,705
Simulations’ results are presented in a tabular and graphical way.
In particular, we have chosen to highlight in tables, with a yellow          5            160      244       96       0,717      0,651
color, cases in which category’s performance overtakes or
equalizes individual’s one.                                                  3            145      264       91       0,712      0,637
                                                                             1            169      255       76       0,667      0,587
4.1         First Simulation
In this first set of simulations we use 20 trustees for category and     all-in-one        83      336       81       0,803      0,656
analyze what happens when both the duration of exploration
phase and the percentage of queried trustees change.
Tables’ legend:
      •     leg : cases in which category’s performance overtakes
            or equalizes individual’s one.
First scenario:
      •     Trustees queried by the trustor: 100%
           Table 1. 80 trustees, 100% queried by the trustor
Expl. Ph.      T win     C win     Equal       C Av        T Av
Fourth scenario:
     •       Trustees queried by the trustor: 10%
             Table 4. 80 trustees, 10% queried by the trustor
Expl. Ph.       T win     C win     Equal      C Av     T Av
   100            209      156       135       0,794    0,784
   50             184      197       119       0,774    0,742
   25             159      248       93        0,754    0,685
   10             175      230       95        0,691    0,642
    5             176      241       83        0,671    0,614
                                                                       Figure 2. Category wins when there are 20 trustees for
    3             169      247       84        0,661    0,600                                category.
    1             170      259       71        0,615    0,548    In the first graph it is easy to see how the value of “trustee wins”
                                                                 decreases when decreases the number of ticks in the exploratory
all-in-one        83       346       71        0,796    0,619    phase, that is when is reduced the number of interactions among
                                                                 the agents before being queried; on the contrary, the value of
                                                                 “category wins” increases proportionally with this reduction (first
Fifth scenario:                                                  effect).
     •       Trustees queried by the trustor: 5%                 At the same time, there is a direct proportionality between the
             Table 5. 80 trustees, 5% queried by the trustor     value of “trustee wins” and the number of trustees queried in the
                                                                 querying phase; while the value of “category wins” increases
Expl. Ph.       T win     C win     Equal      C Av     T Av     proportionally with the reduction of the number of trustees
   100            189      184       127       0,772    0,757    queried (second effect).
   50             188      225       87        0,751    0,709    In practice, both these effects seem suggest how the role of
                                                                 categories becomes relevant when either decreases and degrades
   25             174      220       106       0,700    0,649    the knowledge within the analyzed system (before the interaction
   10             188      219       93        0,659    0,616    with the trustor) or is reduced the transferred knowledge (to the
                                                                 trustor).
    5             174      228       98        0,648    0,611
                                                                 Let us explain better. The first effect can be described with the
    3             176      248       76        0,637    0,589    fact that each agent, reducing the number of interactions with the
    1             190      235       75        0,603    0,559    other agents in the explorative phase, will have relevantly less
                                                                 information with respect to the individual agents. At the same
all-in-one        91       337       72        0,769    0,606    time its knowledge with respect to categories does not undergo a
                                                                 significant decline given that categories' performances derive
                                                                 from several different agents.
Below we synthetize these results in two graph (one for the “t
win” dimension and the other for the “c win” dimension).         The second effect can be explained with the fact that reducing the
                                                                 number of queried trustees, the trustor will receive with
                                                                 decreasing probability information about the more trustworthy
                                                                 individual agents in the domain, while information on categories,
                                                                 maintains a good level of stability also reducing the number of
                                                                 queried agents, thanks to greater robustness of these structures.
                                                                 Resuming, the above pictures clearly show how, when the
                                                                 quantity of information (about the agents' trustworthiness
                                                                 exchanged in the system) decreases, it is better to rely on the
                                                                 categorial   recommendations     rather     than      individual
                                                                 recommendations.
                                                                 This result reaches the point of highest criticality in the “all-in-
                                                                 one” case in which, as expected, “trustee wins” returns the
                                                                 minimal value and “category wins” returns the maximal value.
     Figure 1. Trustee wins when there are 20 trustees for
                          category.                              4.2        Second Simulation
                                                                 In the second set of simulations we try to increment the number of
                                                                 trustees to 100 for category. It means that each trustee has much
                                                                 more neighbors than before.
                                                                 Tables’ legend:
                                                                       •    leg : cases in which category’s performance overtakes
                                                                            or equalizes individual’s one.
Sixth scenario:                                                    Ninth scenario:
     •       Trustees queried by the trustor: 100%                     •    Trustees queried by the trustor: 10%
         Table 6. 400 trustees, 100% queried by the trustor                     Table 9. 100 trustees, 10% queried by the trustor
Expl. Ph.       T win     C win    Equal       C Av     T Av       Expl. Ph.     T win    C win    Equal      C Av       T Av
   100           401        5        94        0,796    0,882         100         344       26      130       0,797      0,864
   50            382        8        110       0,803    0,879         50          318       48      134       0,802      0,858
   25            372        15       113       0,802    0,873         25          271       84      145       0,804      0,843
   10            319        43       138       0,802    0,86          10          239      122      139       0,802      0,82
    5            323        53       124       0,795    0,85           5          223      151      126       0,797      8,02
    3            271        95       134       0,801    0,834          3          176      217      107       0,803      0,769
    1            151       238       111       0,803    0,759          1          106      318       76       0,793      0,663
all-in-one       155       252       93        0,796    0,741      all-in-one        92    322       86       0,796      0,654


Seventh scenario:                                                  Tenth scenario:
     •       Trustees queried by the trustor: 50%                      •    Trustees queried by the trustor: 5%
               Table 7. 100 trustees, 50% queried by the trustor                Table 10. 100 trustees, 5% queried by the trustor
Expl. Ph.       T win     C win    Equal       C Av     T Av       Expl. Ph.     T win    C win    Equal      C Av       T Av
   100           382        3        115       0,799    0,878         100         316       47      137       0,802      0,856
   50            362        27       111       0,801    0,873         50          310       68      122       0,797      0,842
   25            354        20       126       0,799    0,866         25          262      100      138       0,798      0,823
   10            292        65       143       0,804    0,849         10          205      159      136       0,801      0,799
    5            291        79       130        0,8     0,842          5          190      197      113           0,8    0,772
    3            221       142       137       0,803    0,813          3          133      257      110           0,8    0,725
    1            120       276       104       0,797    0,712          1             99    335       66       0,792      0,63
all-in-one       139       270       91        0,800    0,727      all-in-one        80    353       67       0,802      0,622


Eighth scenario:                                                   Again, we summarize the results into two graph.
     •       Trustees queried by the trustor: 25%
               Table 8. 100 trustees, 25% queried by the trustor
Expl. Ph.       T win     C win    Equal       C Av     T Av
   100           367        14       119       0,797    0,872
   50            356        29       115       0,799    0,867
   25            351        39       110       0,798    0,859
   10            273       100       127       0,803    0,836
    5            276       102       122       0,795    0,83
    3            212       144       144       0,801    0,802
    1            113       289       98        0,801    0,705          Figure 3. Trustee wins when there are 100 trustees for
                                                                                             category.
all-in-one       130       274       96        0,797    0,702
                                                                        roles and reciprocal influences. In future works we have to
                                                                        consider how, starting from the analysis of this study, could
                                                                        change the role of knowledge about categories in a situation of
                                                                        open world. In particular, we could experiment the dynamic of
                                                                        this role with respect to the stability of the performances of the
                                                                        different agents becoming to a category.

                                                                        6.        REFERENCES
                                                                        [1] Adomavicius, G., Tuzhilin, A. Toward the next generation of
                                                                            recommender systems: A survey of the state-of-the-art and
                                                                            possible extensions. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and
                                                                            Data Engineering (TKDE) 17, 734–749, 2005
     Figure 4. Category wins when there are 100 trustees for            [2] Burnett, C., Norman, T., and Sycara, K. 2010. Bootstrapping
                           category.                                        trust evaluations through stereotypes. In Proceedings of the
                                                                            9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and
In this second set of simulations, are confirmed the two effects            Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'10). 241248.
detected in the first simulations. However it is possible observe a
greater difficulty of recommendations about categories to prevail       [3] C. Burnett, T. J. Norman, and K. Sycara. Stereotypical trust
on the recommendations about individuals: just strongly reducing            and bias in dynamic multiagent systems. ACM Transactions
the trustees queried by the trustor it is possible value a role for         on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 4(2):26,
categories' recommendations.                                                2013.
This result could be explained with the fact that increasing the        [4] Castelfranchi C., Falcone R., Trust Theory: A Socio-
number of the agents in the neighborhood of each agent, it                  Cognitive and Computational Model, John Wiley and Sons,
increases the possibility to have in it highly trustworthy agents           April 2010.
and as a consequence more agents reporting information about            [5] Conte R., and Paolucci M., 2002, Reputation in artificial
them.                                                                       societies. Social beliefs for social order. Boston: Kluwer
                                                                            Academic Publishers.
5.        CONCLUSIONS                                                   [6] P. De Meo, E. Ferrara, G. Fiumara, and A. Provetti.
In other works [9][10][2] were shown the advantages of using                Improving Recommendation Quality by Merging
reasoning about categorization for selecting trustworthy agents. In         Collaborative Filtering and Social Relationships. In Proc. of
particular, how it were possible to attribute to a certain unknown          the International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design
agent, a value of trustworthiness with respect to a specific task, on       and Applications (ISDA 2011) , Córdoba, Spain, IEEE
the basis of its classification in, and membership to, one (/or             Computer Society Press, 2011
more) category/ies. In practice, the role of generalized knowledge
                                                                        [7] P De Meo, E Ferrara, D Rosaci, and G Sarné. Trust and
and prejudice (in the sense of pre-established judgment on the
                                                                            Compactness of Social Network Groups. IEEE Transactions
agents belonging to that category) has proven to determine the
                                                                            on Cybernetics, PP:99, 2014
possibility to anticipate the value of unknown agents.
In this paper we have investigated the different roles that can play    [8] Falcone R., Castelfranchi C. Generalizing Trust: Inferencing
recommendations about individual agents and about categories of             Trustworthiness from Categories. In: TRUST 2008 - Trust in
agents.                                                                     Agent Societies, 11th International Workshop, TRUST 2008.
In this case the new agent introduced (called trustror) has a whole         Revised Selected and Invited Papers (Estoril, Portugal, 12-13
world of agents completely unknown to it, and ask for                       May 2008). Proceedings, pp. 65 - 80. R. Falcone, S. K.
recommendations to a (variable) subset of agents for selecting an           Barber, J. Sabater-Mir, M. P. Singh (eds.). (Lecture Notes in
agent to whom delegate a task. The information received regards             Artificial Intelligence, vol. 5396). Springer, 2008.
both individual agents and agents' categories. The informative          [9] Falcone R., Piunti, M., Venanzi, M., Castelfranchi C.,
power of these two kinds of recommendations is dependent from               (2013), From Manifesta to Krypta: The Relevance of
the previous interactions among the agents and also from the                Categories for Trusting Others, in R. Falcone and M. Singh
number agents queried by the trustor. However, there are cases in           (Eds.) Trust in Multiagent Systems, ACM Transaction on
which information about categories is more useful that                      Intelligent Systems and Technology, Volume 4 Issue 2,
information towards individual agents. In some sense this result            March 2013
complements the results achieved in [9][10][2] because here we
have a more strict match between information on individual              [10] Falcone R., Sapienza A., Castelfranchi C.,The relevance of
agents and information about categories of agents: We are                    Categories for trusting Information Sources,“Transactions on
measuring the quantity of information, about individual agents               Internet Technology”, submitted
and categories, for evaluating when is better using direct              [11] H. Fang, J. Zhang, M. Sensoy, and N. M. Thalmann. A
information rather than generalized information or, vice versa,              generalized stereotypical trust model. In Proceedings of the
when is better using the positive power of prejudice. Our results            11th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy
show how in certain cases becomes essential the use of categorial            in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), pages 698–
knowledge for selecting qualified partners.                                  705, 2012.
In this work we have in fact considered a closed world, with a
fixed set of agents. This choice was based on the fact that we were     [12] G. Guo, J. Zhang and N. Yorke-Smith, Leveraging
interested to evaluate the relationships between knowledge about             Multiviews of Trust and Similarity to Enhance Clustering-
individual and knowledge about categories, for calibrating their
    based Recommender Systems, Knowledge-Based Systems,            [17] Sabater-Mir, J. 2003. Trust and reputation for agent societies.
    accepted, 2014                                                      Ph.D. thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.
[13] Huynh, T.D., Jennings, N. R. and Shadbolt, N.R. An            [18] M. Sensoy, B. Yilmaz, and T. J. Norman. STAGE:
     integrated trust and reputation model for open multi-agent         Stereotypical trust assessment through graph extraction.
     systems. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent              Computational Intelligence, 2014.
     Systems, 13, (2), 119-154., 2006
                                                                   [19] C. Than and S. Han, Improving Recommender Systems by
[14] P. Lops, M. Gemmis, and G. Semeraro, “Content-based                Incorporating Similarity, Trust and Reputation, Journal of
     recommender systems: State of the art and trends,” in              Internet Services and Information Security (JISIS), volume:
     Recommender Systems Handbook. Springer, pp. 73–105,                4, number: 1, pp. 64-76, 2014
     2011.
                                                                   [20] Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo.
[15] P. Massa, P. Avesani, Trust-aware recommender systems,             http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Center for Connected
     RecSys '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM conference on              Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern
     Recommender systems, 2007                                          University, Evanston, IL.
[16] S. Ramchurn, N. Jennings, Carles Sierra, and Lluis Godo.      [21] Yolum, P. and Singh, M. P. 2003. Emergent properties of
     Devising a trust model for multi-agent interactions using          referral systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd International
     confidence and reputation. Applied Artificial Intelligence,        Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent
     18(9-10):833-852, 2004.                                            Systems (AAMAS'03).