Software agents in virtual organizations: good faith and trust

Virtual organizations tend to play an ever more part in electronic commerce, as well as software agents, here understood as the building blocks of the methodology for problem solving that is being subscribed. Indeed, one of the issues that have to be addressed is the capability of such entities to rationally and autonomously “think” and decide. The behavior of these agents may go more and more unpredictable; they will choose their own strategies and define their own planning where are faced to a problem, being possible that they may act with good faith or with bad faith. This leads us to the absolute need of considering the major issue of trust in software agent’s environments.The work described in this paper is included in Intelligent Agents and Legal Relations project (POCTI/JUR/57221/2004), which is a research project supported by FCT (Science & Technology Foundation . Portugal)