Bid-price control for the formation of multiagent organisations

Abstract

Agents that participate in a multiagent organisation must receive a reasonable compensation for delivering services to this organisation. Otherwise, the agents would refrain from joining the organisation due to their self-interest. Thus, the formation of multiagent organisations is no mechanical process, but subject to considerations of the involved agents. We approach this decision problem by a bid-price approach from quantity-based Revenue Management to maximise each individual agent's expected revenue. The proposed method is evaluated in a simulation with competing service provider agents. The results suggest that our approach is robust for most cases with low demand and outweighs non-discriminating formation processes when supply exceeds demand. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.