General Equilibrium Markets as Distributed Computational Systems

Speaker:  Dr Steve Gjerstad

Affiliation: Chapman University

Location: Room 101, Chamberlain Building (#35), St Lucia Campus

Zoom: https://uqz.zoom.us/j/82603079317

Abstract: Markets coordinate information distributed among agents with competing incentives.  In this sense a market is a distributed multi-agent mechanism that can find an optimal solution to a computational problem that is unknown to any individual market participant.  This paper demonstrates that capacity of markets by defining automated agents in a distributed system that implement a socially desirable resource allocation.  The paper reports results of simulations with automated agents in a general equilibrium market and, in addition, those agents interact in their market with human subjects, so that we can assess the bargaining capacity of the agents relative to human capabilities.