Information sharing using an electronic marketplace

The intelligence failures preceding the September 11 terrorist attacks highlight critical shortcomings with the sharing of information between government organizations. Fixing these problems involves overcoming technological and cultural barriers, fostering openness while not endangering privacy and security. We describe an approach to information sharing using an electronic marketplace, similar in some respects to eBay, that facilitates and incentivizes cooperation while minimizing exposure to abuses of privacy and security. To investigate the properties of this approach, we have devised a game, Find the Ring, that centers on an electronic marketplace for information sharing among the players. We analyze this game theoretically and describe the results of experiments run using software agents as players.