Stable strategies for sharing information among agents

Information sharing is important for different goals, such as sharing reputations of sellers among potential buyers, load balancing, solving technical problems, etc. In the short run, providing information as a response to queries is often unbeneficial. In the long run, mechanisms that enable beneficial stable strategies for information exchange can be found. This paper presents such mechanisms and specifies under which conditions it is beneficial to the agents to answer queries. We analyze a model of repeated encounters in which two agents ask each other queries over time. We present different strategies that enable information exchange, and compare them according to the expected utility for the agents, and the conditions required for the cooperative equilibrium to exist.