This paper was presented at the Artificial Societies and Computational Markets Workshop at the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA '98), Minneapolis/St. Paul, May 9, 1998.

Spontaneous Specialization in a Free-Market Economy of Agents

James E. Hanson and Jeffrey O. Kephart
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598

Abstract:

In a free-market economy of software agents, information is produced, traded, and consumed by vast numbers of autonomous, self-motivated agents. An essential task in this economy is the retailing or brokering of information, whereby information is gathered from the right producers and distributed to the right consumers. This paper investigates one crucial aspect of a broker's dynamical behavior, its ability to specialize--i.e., to carve out a market niche for itself in a highly dynamic, potentially competitive environment--in the context of a simple information filtering economy.

• Introduction
• A model news filtering economy
• Specialization without competition
  • Uniformly distributed consumer interests
  • All-or-nothing interest profiles
• Competitive webs
• Conclusions and open questions
• References
• About this document ...