Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
Communications of the ACM
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques
NetBill: An Internet commerce system optimized for network delivered services
COMPCON '95 Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Computer Society International Conference
Recovery semantics for a DB/DC system
ACM '73 Proceedings of the ACM annual conference
Making trust explicit in distributed commerce transactions
ICDCS '96 Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '96)
Competitive Sourcing for Internet Commerce
ICDCS '98 Proceedings of the The 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
The networked information economy: applied and theoretical frameworks for electronic commerce
The networked information economy: applied and theoretical frameworks for electronic commerce
Equilibrium analysis of the possibilities of unenforced exchange in multiagent systems
IJCAI'95 Proceedings of the 14th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
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In a multi-party transaction (also called a distributed commerce transaction) agents face risks from dealing with untrusted agents. These risks are compounded in the face of deadlines, e.g., an agent may fail to deliver purchased goods by the time the goods are needed. We characterize the risks, and present a distributed algorithm that mitigates these risks, by using pairwise exchanges and trusted intermediaries. The algorithm generates a safe sequence of actions that completes a commerce transaction without risk, if such a sequence exists. We show that the algorithm is sound (produces only safe multi-agent action sequences) and complete (finds a safe sequence whenever one exists). The initial restriction of guaranteeing safety even when none of the principals trusts another can be relaxed in some cases, so we show how to handle principals that do trust each other and interact directly rather than through a trusted intermediary.