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The Web is becoming a global market place, where the same services and products are offered by different providers. When obtaining a service, consumers have to select one provider among many alternatives to receive a service or buy a product. In real life, when obtaining a service, many consumers depend on the user reviews. User reviews-presumably written by other consumers-provide details on the consumers' experiences and thus are more informative than ratings. The down side is that such user reviews are written in natural language, making it extremely difficult to be interpreted by computers. Therefore, current technologies do not allow automation of user reviews and require too much human effort for tasks such as writing and reading reviews for the providers, aggregating existing information, and finally choosing among the possible candidates. In this paper, we represent consumers' reviews as machine processable structures using ontologies and develop a layered multiagent framework to enable consumers to find satisfactory service providers for their needs automatically. The framework can still function successfully when consumers evolve their language and when deceptive reviewers enter the system. We show the flexibility of the framework by employing different algorithms for various tasks and evaluate them for different circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interaction protocols enable agents to communicate with each other effectively. Whereas several approaches exist to specify interaction protocols, none of them has design tools that can help protocol designers catch semantic protocol errors at design time. As research in networking protocols has shown, flawed specifications of protocols can have disastrous consequences. Hence, it is crucial to systematically analyze protocols in time to ensure effective specification. This paper first studies and formalizes important generic properties of commitment protocols that can ease their effective and consistent development significantly. Next, we identify robustness properties of protocols that are useful in determining the applicability of protocols in different settings. Since these properties are formal, they can easily be incorporated in a software tool to (semi-)automate the design and specification of commitment protocols. Where appropriate we provide algorithms that can directly be used to check these properties in such a design tool. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Consider a decentralized agent-based approach for service location, where agents provide and consume services, and also cooperate with each other by giving referrals to other agents. That is, the agents form a referral network. Based on feedback from their users, the agents judge the quality of the services provided by others. Further, based on the judgments of service quality, the agents also judge the quality of the referrals given by others. The agents can thus adaptively select their neighbors in order to improve their local performance. The choices by the agents cause communities to emerge. According to our definition, an agent belongs to a community only if it has been useful to the other members of the community in prior interactions regarding a particular topic. Hence, the membership in different communities is determined based on relationships among the agents. This paper compares topic-sensitive communities of the above kind with communities as studied in traditional link analysis. It studies the correlation between the two kinds of communities as they emerge in referral networks and evaluates the two kinds of communities in terms of their effectiveness in locating service providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Organizational design is an important topic in the literature on organizations. Usually the design principles are addressed informally in this literature. This paper makes a first attempt to formally introduce design operators to formalize the design steps in the process of designing organizations. These operators help an organization designer create an organization design from scratch as well as offer the possibility to revise existing designs of organizations. The operators offer both top-down refinements and bottom-up grouping options. Importantly, the operators can be combined into complex operators that can serve as patterns for larger steps in an organization design process. The usability of the design operators is demonstrated in a running example. The contribution of this paper provides a solid basis for the development of a software environment supporting interactive organization design processes. This is demonstrated by an implemented prototype example tool. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

For a given service demand, it is necessary to select a suitable service provider among many possibilities. An accurate selection is difficult when consumers do not have a significant history with many of the service providers and thus need to interact with others to make informed selections. In traditional approaches, consumers rate the service providers and exchange these ratings among each other. Contrary to traditional, rating-based service provider selection, this paper advocates an objective, experience-based approach in which consumers record their experiences with service providers rather than the overall, subjective ratings. A consumer's experience with a provider captures the requested service and the delivered service in terms of service-specific attribute values. When an experience is transferred from one service consumer to another, the receiving consumer evaluates the experience using her own evaluation criteria. By sharing experiences, service consumers can model service providers accurately and thus make better selections for their needs. Rating-based strategies use highly subjective information for decision making since ratings depend on satisfaction criteria of the rater. However, the proposed method uses experiences, which do not include any interpretation. Comparisons of experience-based and rating-based strategies show that the experience-based approach results in higher customer satisfaction rates in many real-life settings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]