Investigating e-market evolution

Abstract

A market is in equilibrium if there is no opportunity for risk-free, or low-risk, profit. The majority of real markets are not in equilibrium thus presenting the opportunity for novel forms of transactions to take advantage of such risk-free, or low-risk, profits. The introduction of such novel forms of transaction is an instance of market evolution. A project is investigating the market evolutionary process in a particular electronic market that has been constructed in an on-going collaborative research project between a university and a software house. The way in which actors (buyers, sellers and others) use the market will be influenced by the information available to them, including information drawn from outside the immediate market environment. In this experiment, data mining and filtering techniques are used to distil both individual signals drawn from the markets and signals from the Internet into meaningful advice for the actors. The goal of this experiment is first to learn how actors will use the advice available to them, and second how the market will evolve through entrepreneurial intervention. In this electronic market a multiagent process management system is used to manage all market transactions including those that drive the market evolutionary process. © 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.