A Formal Framework for Reasoning about Opportunistic Propensity in Multi-agent Systems

In the electronic market, buyers are cautious that they will receive products in bad quality. This is because only sellers on the other side of the market know whether the products are good enough before buyers receive them. The sellers can exploit the situation of knowledge asymmetry between seller and buyers to achieve their own gain at the expense of the buyers. Such behavior, which is intentionally performed by the sellers, was named opportunistic behavior (or opportunism) by economist Williamson [6].