Dynamic pricing by software agents

13 years 4 months ago

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We envision a future in which the global economy and the Internet will merge and evolve together into an information economy bustling with billions of economically motivated software agents that exchange information goods and services with humans and other agents. Economic software agents will di er in important ways from their human counterparts, and these di erences may have signi cant bene cial or harmful e ects upon the global economy. It is therefore important to consider the economic incentives and behaviors of economic software agents, and to use every available means to anticipate their collective interactions. We survey research conducted by the Information Economies group at IBM Research aimed at understanding collective interactions among agents that dynamically price information goods or services. In particular, we study the potential impact of widespread shopbot usage on prices, the price dynamics that may ensue from various mixtures of automated pricing agents or pricebo...

Jeffrey O. Kephart, James E. Hanson, Amy R. Greenw

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