Auctions provide an efficient way of resolving one-to-many negotiations. This is particularly true for automated agents where delays and long communications carry negative externalities. A properly designed auction, tailored to the specific needs of the relevant multi-agent system, can...

The theory, principles and practice of multi-agent systems is typically characterised as a computational and engineering discipline, since it is through the medium of computational systems that artificial agent systems are most commonly expressed. However, most definitions of agency draw...

This paper provides a framework for explicitly modeling the information gathering activities of potential entrants and analyzes how entry behavior is affected by these activities. We assume that information is acquired secretly and that firms face uncertainty about more than one variable. When...

Automated agents are increasingly being used to interact on behalf of individuals and organizations in electronic markets. Agents are used, for example, to explore the set of possible contracts and to trade in communication bandwidth. Users choose agents which are then matched on various...

Automated agents for electronic markets are very valuable when a large amount of information must be processed quickly or employing human traders is not cost-effective. In markets for communication bandwidth, rights to transmit data are traded through a network. Since demand fluctuates...

Traditional economic wisdom says that free entry in a market will drive profits down to zero. This paper shows that profits may remain bounded away from zero when firms have to make a negligible small investment to learn the demand.

We formally incorporate the option to gather information into a game and thus endogenize the information structure. We ask whether models with exogenous information structures are robust with respect to this endogenization. Any Nash equilibrium of the game with information acquisition induces a...

We consider the consequences of competition between two types of experimental exchange mechanisms, a “decentralized bargaining” market, and a “centralized” market. It is shown that decentralized bargaining is subject to a process of “unraveling” in which relatively high value traders...

Much of the economic value of electronic commerce comes from the automation of interactions between businesses and individuals. Game theory is a useful set of tools that can be used by designers of electronic-commerce applications in analyzing and engineering of automated agents and...

Despite the recent misfortunes of many dotcoms, e-commerce will have major and lasting effects on economic activity. But the rise and fall in the valuations of the first wave of e-commerce companies show that vague promises of distant profits are insufficient. Only business models based on sound...