Abstract
Trust plays a vital role in the decision to initiate any interaction. Rational agents may use past experiences and other agents' opinions to decide to trust, but due to the nature of open multi-agent systems, agents can dynamically join and leave the system at any time where agents may find themselves dealing with complete strangers whom neither they nor their friends have encountered before. This situation forces the agents to choose partners randomly, which significantly increases the risk of encountering unreliable agents. In this paper, we address that issue by creating a Trust Certificate model that allows agents to retrieve reputation information and make initial trust evaluations when evidence is unavailable. It also helps agents to avoid the need to make a random partner selection due to the information scarcity. We show how this model enhances the interaction process between agents by evaluating it in the context of a simulated multi-agent system.