Market price systems constitute a well-understood class of mechanisms that under certain conditions provide effective decentralization of decision making with minimal communication overhead. In a market-oriented programming approach to distributed problem solving, we derive the activities and resource allocations for a set of computational agents by computing the competitive equilibrium of an artificial economy. Walras provides basic constructs for defining computational market structures, and protocols for deriving their corresponding price equilibria. In a particular realization of this approach for a form of multicommodity flow problem, we see that careful construction of the decision process according to economic principles can lead to efficient distributed resource allocation, and that the behavior of the system can be meaningfully analyzed in economic terms. 1. Distributed Planning and Economics In a distributed or multiagent planning system, the plan for the system as a whole i...

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This report describes simple mechanisms that allow autonomous software agents to engage in bargaining behaviors in market-based environments. Groups of agents with such mechanisms could be used in applications including market-based control, internet commerce, and economic modelling. After an introductory discussion of the rationale for this work, and a brief overview of key concepts from economics, work in market-based control is reviewed to highlight the need for bargaining agents. Following this, the early experimental economics work of Smith (1962) and the recent results of Gode and Sunder (1993) are described.

This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet. We describe the history and current state of the Internet, discuss some of the pressing economic and regulatory problems, and speculate about future developments.

This paper presents a precise market model for a well-defined class of distributed configuration design problems. Given a design problem, the model defines a computational economy to allocate basic resources to agents participating in the design. The result of running these "design economies" constitutes the market solution to the original problem. After defining the configuration design framework, I describe the mapping to computational economies and our results to date. For some simple examples, the system can produce good designs relatively quickly. However, analysis shows that the design economies are not guaranteed to find optimal designs, and we identify and discuss some of the major pitfalls. Despite known shortcomings and limited explorations thus far, the market model offers a useful conceptual viewpoint for analyzing distributed design problems.

. Social insects provide us with a powerful metaphor to create decentralized systems of simple interacting, and often mobile, agents. The emergent collective intelligence of social insects -- swarm intelligence -- resides not in complex individual abilities but rather in networks of interactions that exist among individuals and between individuals and their environment. In particular, a recently proposed model of division of labor in a colony of primitively eusocial wasps, based on a simple reinforcement of response thresholds, can be transformed into a decentralized adaptive algorithm of task allocation. An application of such an algorithm is proposed in the context of a mail company, but virtually any type of flexible task allocation can be described within the same framework. 1 Introduction Evidence of the ecological success of social insects can be found almost everywhere [56]. Some of the main reasons for this success are to be looked for in the organization of insect societies, ...

. Mobile codetechnology leads to a new type of "open systems": instead of applying openness to a standardization process we now require the running systems to become open for foreign code. The question then is how far this technical openness can go for mobile code. The less constraints we impose on hosts running mobile code, the more can the benefits of mobile code be exploited. However, there must necessarily be basic constraints regarding the utilization of resources which are always finite and most of the time will be operated near the saturation point. In this paper we argue in favor of openness even at the level of resource allocation. We link this topic to (open) market models, describe the mechanisms we developed so far for communication messengers and show how they are used to allocate resourcesin anopenway. Finally we present experimental results of validation runs which help us testing these mechanisms. Keywords: Mobile code, communication messengers, open resourc...

This paper proposes a new computing model called computational field model for solving a problem in an object-oriented open distributed environment. In this model, we envisage an open-ended distributed environment as a continuous computational field. We introduce the notion of mass, distance, gravitational force, repulsive force, and inertia of objects to define a metric space for the field, so that objects migrate to their (sub)optimal (or satisfactory) locations. We also propose a communication model called assimilation/dissimilation model, where communication is represented as the assimilation/dissimilation of messenger objects and their migration. 1 Introduction The more development we see in computer and communication technologies, the more our expectations of computer systems grow. Current demands on computer systems can be summarized as follows: solving larger and more complex problems, realizing more reliable real-time processing, and providing better user interfaces. When pr...

One scenario of the future of computation populates the Internet with vast numbers of software agents providing, trading, and using a rich variety of information goods and services in an open, free-market economy. An essential task in such an economy is the retailing or brokering of information: gathering it from the right producers and distributing it to the right consumers. This paper investigates one crucial aspect of brokers' dynamical behavior, their price-setting mechanisms, in the context of a simple information filtering economy. We consider only the simplest cases in which a broker sets its price and product parameters based solely on the system's current state, without explicit prediction of the future. Analytical and numerical results show that the system's dynamical behavior in such "myopic" cases is generically an unending cycle of disastrous competitive "wars" in price/product space. These in turn are directly attributable to the existence of multiple peaks in the broker...

Complex systems often behave in unexpected ways that are not easily predictable from the behavior of their components; this is known as emergent behavior. As software systems grow in complexity, interconnectedness, and geographic distribution, we will increasingly face unwanted emergent behavior. Unpredictable software systems are hard to debug and hard to manage. We need better tools and methods for anticipating, detecting, diagnosing, and ameliorating emergent misbehavior. These tools and methods will require research into the causes and nature of emergent misbehavior in software systems.