Abstract not found

In this paper we suggest that soft security such as social control has to be used to create secure open systems. Social control means that it is the participants themselves who are responsible for the security, as opposed to leaving the security to some external or global authority. Social mechanisms don't deny the existence of malicious participants. Instead they are aiming at avoiding interaction with them. This makes them more robust than hard security mechanisms such as passwords, who reveal everything if they are bypassed. We describe our work in progress of constructing a workbench to run simulations of electronic markets. By examining the success of different security mechanisms to avoid maliciously behaving actors we hope to gain insight into how to create electronic markets. The idea of creating reputations for the participants is discussed. Finally some legal aspects on using social control and reputation as security mechanisms are discussed.

Visionary projections of a wide-area network teeming with intelligent agents describe an environment where end-users and their agents can pick and choose among a great variety of potentially valuable information services. However, neither network capabilities nor users' time and money are infinite. Computational markets provide one type of mechanism for allocating limited resources in such an environment in a distributed, dynamic way. Moreover, the underlying economic theory provides an analytical framework for predicting aggregate behavior and designing individual agents. In this paper, we describe a prototypical computational market model for information services distributed over a network. Our initial focus is on the economic problem of when and where to establish mirror sites for the more popular information services. Competitive agents choose to set up mirrors based on going prices for network bandwidth, computational resources, and the information service. Depending on the experi...

In computational markets utilizing algorithms that establish a market equilibrium (general equilibrium), competitive behavior is usually assumed: each agent makes its demand (supply) decisions so as to maximize its utility (profit) assuming that it has no impact on market prices. However, there is a potential gain from strategic behavior (via speculating about others) because an agent does affect the market prices, which affect the supply/demand decisions of others, which again affect the market prices that the agent faces. This paper presents a method for computing the maximal advantage of speculative behavior in equilibrium markets. Our analysis is valid for a wide variety of known market protocols. We also construct demand revelation strategies that guarantee that an agent can drive the market to an equilibrium where the agent's maximal advantage from speculation materializes. Our study of a particular market shows that as the number of agents increases, gains from ...

Distributed operating systems provide users with transparent access to networkwide resources. As changes occur to network resources or as user locations and preferences evolve, the system must be able to adapt by reallocating, replicating, or moving its resources. We explore a market-based approach to resource allocation in suchenvironments, and describe initial experiments in designing and building computational markets for distributed operating system resources. We focus on the problem of redistributing network file allocations for a mobile user population in order to improvelocality and accessibility.