Shop`til You Drop I: Market Trading Interactions as Adaptive Behavior Shop`til You Drop I: Market Trading Interactions as Adaptive B E H a Vior

We argue that human economic interactions particularly bargaining and trading in market environments can be considered as adaptive behaviors Moreover the tools and techniques of adaptive behavior research could be pro tably employed to build predictive models of existing or planned market systems In addition to applications in economic modeling trading animats could nd use in market based resource allocation and control and in internet based commerce Despite these potential applications we note that there is a near total absence of papers in the adaptive behavior literature and also in the arti cial life literature that deal with autonomous agents capable of exhibiting trading behaviors After a brief overview of core concepts in microeconomics we summarize work in experimental economics where human trading behavior is studied under laboratory conditions We propose that such experiments could and should be used as benchmarks for evaluating and comparing di erent architectures and strategies for trading animats This paper is essentially a position paper a manifesto calling the attention of the adaptive behavior research community to an entire eld of problems that it has apparently so far ignored In a companion paper we present empirical results from simulations that invite a Braitenberg style eliminative materialism perspective on the dynamics of experimental retail markets Topic Areas Collective and Social Behavior Software Agents Applied Adaptive Behavior Methodology Shop til you drop I Market Trading Interactions as Adaptive Behavior