Sustaining Individual Incentives while Maximizing Aggregate Social Welfare: A Mediated Brokering Technique for Trading Agents in Next-Generation Electronic Markets

摘要

Finding automated matches between buyer and seller agents in electronic markets has been a dominant area of research in multi-agent e-business systems. While a number of heuristics have been explored for brokering transactions, in the vast majority of systems there is potentially a conflict behveen maximizing global welfare or surplus, versus allowing each agent to act in self interest to optimize its individual gains. This paper describes a technique applicable to brokering transactions in agent-based electronic markets that permits us to maximize aggregate social welfare (defined as aggregate surplus) while, at the same time, allowing each agent to find a transaction partner that is myopically optimal from its self-interested perspective.