A market protocol for decentralized task allocation

We present a decentralized market protocol for allocating tasks among agents that contend for scarce resources. Agents trade tasks and resources at prices determined by an auction protocol. We specify a simple set of bidding policies that, along with the auction mechanism, exhibits desirable convergence properties. The system always reaches quiescence. If the system reaches quiescence below the consumer´s reserve price for the high level task, it will be in a solution state. If the system finds a solution it will reach quiescence in a solution state. Experimental evidence supports our conjecture that the system will converge to a solution when one exists and the consumer bids sufficiently high. We describe the system´s application to and implementation in an agent-based digital library