Skip to main content
×
×
Home

From market to non-market: An autonomous agent approach to central planning1

  • DAN GREENWOOD (a1)
Abstract

In the longstanding debate in political economy about the feasibility of socialism, the Austrian School of Economists have argued that markets are an indispensable means of evaluating goods, hence a prerequisite for productive efficiency. Socialist models for non-market economic calculation have been strongly influenced by the equilibrium model of neoclassical economics. The Austrians contend that these models overlook the essence of the calculation problem by assuming the availability of knowledge that can be acquired only through the market process itself. But the debate in political economy has not yet considered the recent emergence of agent-based systems and their applications to resource allocation problems. Agent-based simulations of market exchange offer a promising approach to fulfilling the dynamic functions of knowledge encapsulation and discovery that the Austrians show to be performed by markets. Further research is needed in order to develop an agent-based approach to the calculation problem, as it is formulated by the Austrians. Given that the macro-level objectives of agent-based systems can be easily engineered, they could even become a desirable alternative to the real markets that the Austrians favour.

Copyright
References
Hide All
Armentano, D. 1969 Resource Allocation Problems Under Socialism. In Snavely, W. P. (ed.), Theory of Economic Systems. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, pp. 127–139.
Bagnall, A. J. and Smith, G. D. 2005 A multi-Agent Model of the UK Market in Electricity Generation. Draft. Accessed 26th August 2007. Available from: www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/lcsg/bagnau.pdf
Barone, E. 1935 The ministry of production in the collectivist state. In Hayek, F.A. (ed.), Collectivist Economic Planning. London: Routledge, pp. 245–290.
Boettke, P. 1990 The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism. London: Routledge.
Boettke, P. 1993 Why Perestroika Failed. London:Routledge.
Clearwater, S. (ed.) 1996. Market-Based Control: A Paradigm for Distributed Resource Allocation. London: World Scientific.
Cliff, D. and Bruten, J. 1997 Zero is not enough: on the lower limit of agent intelligence for continuous double auction markets, Technical Report HPL-97-141. Bristol: HP Labs.
Cliff, D. and Bruten, J. 1998 Simple bargaining agents for decentralized market-based control, Technical Report HPL-98-17. Bristol: HP Labs.
Cockshott, W. P. 1990 Application of artificial intelligence techniques to economic planning. Future Computing Systems 2(4), 429443.
Cockshott, W. P. and Cottrell, A. 1993 Towards a New Socialism. Nottingham: Spokesman.
Common, M. 1995 Sustainability and Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dickinson, H. D. 1933 Price formation in a socialist community. The Economic Journal 43(170),237250.
Endriss, U. and Maudet, N. 2004 Welfare engineering in multiagent systems. In Engineering Societies in the Agents World IV Lecture Notes in Artifical Intelligence. Springer-Verlag, pp. 93106.
Gilbert, N. and Troitzsch, K.G. 2005 Simulation for the Social Scientist, Maidenhead, McGraw–Hill.
Gjerstad, S and Dickhaut, J, 1998. Price formation in double auctions. Games and Economic Behavior 22, 129.
Hayek, F. A. 1949 Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayek, F. A. 1978 New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hayek, F. A. 1979 Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Jacques, I. 1999 Mathematics for Economics and Business. New York, Addision Wesley.
Kephart, J. O. 2002 Software agents and the route to the information economy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 99(Suppl 3), 72077213.
Lange, O. 1937 On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One. The Review of Economic Studies 4, 5371.
Lavoie, D. 1985 Rivalry and Central Planning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lavoie, D. 1990 Computation, Incentives, and discovery: the cognitive function of markets in market socialism. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 507, 7279.
Lemaître, M. and Verfaillie, G. 1999 Exploiting a common property resource under a fairness contraint: a case study. In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, pp. 206211.
Leontief, W. 1966 Input-Output Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luck, M., McBurney, P. and Preist, C. 2003 Agent Technology: Enabling Next Generation Computing Agent Technology: A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing. Southampton: AgentLinkII—the European Network of Excellence for Agent-Based Computing.
McBurney, P. 2005 Kurdaitcha Bones—2005. Available from: www.csc.liv.ac.uk/∼peter/this-month/kurdaitcha-2005.html, Accessed 14-Nov-2005.
Miller, M. S. and Drexler, K. E. 1988a Comparative ecology: a computational perspective. In Huberman, B. A. (ed.), The Ecology of Computation. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, pp. 51–76.
Miller, M. S. and Drexler, K. E. 1988b. Markets and computation: agoric open systems. In Huberman, B. A. (ed.) The Ecology of Computation. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, pp. 133–176.
Mises, L. von, 1935 Economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth. In Hayek, F. A. (ed.), Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies On The Possibilities Of Socialism. London, Routledge, pp. 87–130.
Murrell, P. 1983 Did the theory of market socialism answer the challenge of Ludwig von Mises? History of Political Economy 15(1) 92105.
Nicolaisen, J., Petrov, V. and Tesfatsion, L. 2001. Market power and efficiency in a computational electricity market with discriminatory double-auction pricing.Economic Report No.52, Iowa State University.
Phelps, S., McBurney, P., Parsons, S. and Sklar, E., 2002 Co-evolutionary auction mechanism design: a preliminary report. In Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce IV: Designing Mechanisms and Systems, Bologna, Italy.
Ramsay-Steele, D. 1992 From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation. La Salle, Open Court Publishing.
Robinson, N. 2002 Evolutionary optimisation of market-based control systems for resource allocation in compute farms, HPL-2002-284. Bristol: Internet Storage and Systems Laboratory, HP Labs.
Rust, J., Miller, H. and Palmer, R. 1993 Behaviour of trading automata in a computerized double auction market. In Friedman, D. and Rust, J. (eds.), The Double Auction Market: Institutions, Theories and Evidence, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, pp. 155–199.
Samuelson, P. A. and Nordhaus, W. D. 1995 Economics. New York; London: McGraw–Hill.
Schumpeter, J. 1954 History of Economic Analysis. London: Allen & Unwin.
Tesauro, G. and Das, R., 2001 High-Performance Bidding Agents for the Continuous Double Auction. In Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. Tampa, FL: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM EC'01). pp. 206209.
Tesfatsion, L. 2006 Agent-based computational economics: a constructive approach to economic theory, Vol. 2. In Amman, H. M., Kendrick, D. A. and Rust, J. (eds.) Handbook of Computational Economics. Amsterdam; Oxford. Elsevier, pp. 831–880.
Vaughn, K. I. 1980 Economic calculation under socialism: the austrian contribution. Economic Inquiry, 18(4), 534554.
Virginas, B., Voudouris, C., Owusu, G. and Anim-Ansah, G. 2003 ARMS collaborator—intelligent agents using markets to organise resourcing in modern enterprises. BT Technology Journal, 21(4) 5964.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

The Knowledge Engineering Review
  • ISSN: 0269-8889
  • EISSN: 1469-8005
  • URL: /core/journals/knowledge-engineering-review
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *
×

Metrics

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 16 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 122 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 12th June 2018. This data will be updated every 24 hours.