International Conference on Multiagent Systems ( ICMAS - 95 ) , San Francisco , CA , USA , June 1995 A Simple Computational Market for Network Information Services

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 ser vices However neither network capabilities nor users time and money are in nite Computational markets provide one type of mechanism for allocating limited resources in such an environment in a distributed dy namic way Moreover the underlying economic theory provides an analytical framework for predicting aggre gate behavior and designing individual agents In this paper we describe a prototypical computational mar ket model for information services distributed over a network Our initial focus is on the economic prob lem 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 experimen tal setup we observed a range of qualitative behaviors