Abstract
We introduce self-interested evolutionary market agents, which act on behalf of service providers in a large decentralised system, to adaptively price their resources over time. Our agents competitively co-evolve in the live market, driving it towards the Bertrand equilibrium, the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium, at which all sellers charge their reserve price and share the market equally. We demonstrate that this outcome results in even load-balancing between the service providers.
Our contribution in this paper is twofold; the use of on-line competitive co-evolution of self-interested service providers to drive a decentralised market towards equilibrium, and a demonstration that load-balancing behaviour emerges under the assumptions we describe.
Unlike previous studies on this topic, all our agents are entirely self-interested; no cooperation is assumed. This makes our problem a non-trivial and more realistic one.
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Lewis, P.R., Marrow, P., Yao, X. (2008). Evolutionary Market Agents for Resource Allocation in Decentralised Systems. In: Rudolph, G., Jansen, T., Beume, N., Lucas, S., Poloni, C. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN X. PPSN 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5199. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87700-4_106
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87700-4_106
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