Context. Connected vehicles use sensors such as cameras or radars to collect data about surrounding environments automatically and share these data with each other or with road side infrastructure using short-range wireless communication. Due to the large amount of information generated, strategies are required to minimize information redundancy when important information is propagated among connected vehicles. Objectives. This research aims to develop an information propagation strategy in connected vehicle systems using software agent-based coordination strategies to reduce unnecessary message broadcast and message propagation delay. Methods. A review of related work is used to acquire a deep insight as well as knowledge of the state-of-the-art and the state-of-practice from relevant studies in the subject area. Based on the review of related work, we propose an agent-based coordination strategy for information propagation in connected vehicle systems, in which connected vehicles coordinate their message broadcast activities using auctions. After that, a simulation experiment is conducted to evaluate the proposed strategy by comparing it with existing representative strategies. Results. Results of simulation experiments and statistical tests show that the proposed agent-based coordination strategy manifest some improvements in reducing unnecessary message broadcast and message propagation delay compared to other strategies involved in the simulation experiments. Conclusions. In this research, we suggest a new strategy to manage the propagation of information in connected vehicle systems. According to the small scale simulation analysis, the use of auctions to select message transmitters enables our proposed strategy to achieve some improvements in reducing unnecessary message broadcast and propagation delay than existing strategies. Thus, with the help of our proposed strategy, unnecessary message broadcast can be minimized and the communication resources of connected vehicle systems can be utilized effectively. Also, important safety messages can be propagated to drivers faster, negative traffic events could be averted.