Efficiency and Equilibrium in Task Allocation Economics with Hierarchical Dependencies

William E. Walsh and Michael Wellman

Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute

Abstract: We analyze economic efficiency and equilibrium properties in decentralized task allocation problems involving hierarchical dependencies and resource contention. We bound the inefficiency of a type of approximate equilibrium in proportion to the number of agents and the bidding parameters in a particular market protocol. This protocol converges to an approximate equilibrium with respect to all agents, except those which may acquire unneeded inputs. We introduce a decommitment phase to allow such agents to decommit from their input contracts. Experiments indicate that the augmented market protocol produces highly efficient allocations on average.

Keywords: Supply chain formation; competitive equilibrium; distributed systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-mic
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wop:safiwp:99-07-049

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