Title
A diversity dilemma in evolutionary markets
Abstract
Markets are useful mechanisms for performing resource allocation in fully decentralised computational and other systems, since they can possess a range of desirable properties, such as efficiency, decentralisation, robustness and scalability. In this paper we investigate the behaviour of co-evolving evolutionary market agents as adaptive offer generators for sellers in a multi-attribute posted-offer market. We demonstrate that the evolutionary approach enables sellers to automatically position themselves in market niches, created by heterogeneous buyers. We find that a trade-off exists for the evolutionary sellers between maintaining high population diversity to facilitate movement between niches and low diversity to exploit the current niche and maximise cumulative payoff. We characterise the trade-off from the perspective of the system as a whole, and subsequently from that of an individual seller. Our results highlight a decision on risk aversion for resource providers, but crucially we show that rational self-interested sellers would not adopt the behaviour likely to lead to the ideal result from the system point of view.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/2378104.2378133
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Electronic Commerce
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
system point,resource allocation,resource provider,low diversity,evolutionary market agent,diversity dilemma,multi-attribute posted-offer market,high population diversity,market niche,evolutionary approach,evolutionary seller,co evolution
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
14
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Peter R. Lewis125330.22
Paul Marrow2889.26
Xin Yao314858945.63