Specifying and monitoring market mechanisms using rights and obligations

Abstract

We provide a formal scripting language to capture the semantics of market mechanisms. The language is based on a set of welldefined principles, and is designed to capture an agent's rights, as derived from property, and an agent's obligations, as derived from restrictions placed on its actions, either voluntarily or as a consequence of other actions. Rights and obligations are viewed as first-class goods, from which we define fundamental axioms about well-functioning market-oriented worlds. Coupled with the scripting language is a run-time system that is able to monitor and enforce rights and obligations. Our treatment extends to represent a variety of market mechanisms, ranging from simple two-agent single-good exchanges to complicated combinatorial auctions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.