SPIPS is currently being conducted by:
- Jeff MacKie-Mason
- Ed Durfee
- Bob Gazzale
- Chris Brooks
Collaborators: IBM’s Information economies research group.
Networked information technology, in particular the Internet, has created new opportunities for the exchange of digital information goods in an environment where the consumer population is changing and firms face a great deal of uncertainty. In this case, firms must decide how much they should learn about the consumer population, given that this learning is costly.
More broadly, we are interested in how agents in such an economy can form or locate niche markets, rather than competing for the mass market, and in identifying the conditions needed for niches to appeal to producers. In general, niches appear to be associated with a firm’s desire to learn about a consumer population (as opposed to exploiting current knowledge) and its willingness to forego some current profit in the hope of extracting larger profits in the future.
This involves both analytical work, in which we determine whether rational producers should choose to learn and identify the conditions needed for niches to be attractive to producers, and computational work, in which we characterize the behavior of adaptive producers within a parameterized model and study how changed in this model affect learnability and the desire to explore rather than exploit.
Links to code for performing experiments and analysis will be added here.
To come:
- Amoeba implementation in C++ and Lisp.
- Matlab code for analyzing niche differentiation and best-response learning.
- Lisp code for GA search in category space.
Resources
- Leigh Tesfatsion’s page on Agent-based Computational Economics.
Other links
- The ACM Special Interest Group in Electronic Commerce.
Proposal
Executive summary of NSF Proposal. The document summarizing the research we are currently working on.
Past work:
These are publications not funded by SPIPS, but which are both relevant to our research and useful for understanding our research trajectory.
- Christopher H. Brooks, Scott Fay, Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, Jeffrey O. Kephart and Edmund H. Durfee. Automated Strategy Searches in an Electronic Goods Market: Learning and Complex Price Schedules. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (SIGECOMM), November, 1999.
- Christopher H. Brooks, Edmund H. Durfee and Rajarshi Das. Price Wars and Niche Discovery in an Information Economy. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, October, 2000, pp 95-106.
Currently published work:
- Christopher H. Brooks, Robert S. Gazzale, Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Edmund H. Durfee. Model Selection in an Information Economy: Choosing what to Learn. To appear in Computational Intelligence, 2002.
- Jeffrey O. Kephart, Christopher H. Brooks, Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, Robert Gazzale, and Edmund H. Durfee. Pricing Information Bundles in a Dynamic Environment. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce 2001 (EC-01), pages 180-190, October 2001.
- Robert S. Gazzale and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason. Endogenous Differentiation of Information Goods under Uncertainty. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce 2001 (EC-01), pages 75-84, October 2001.
- Christopher H. Brooks, Rajarshi Das, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, Robert S. Gazzale, and Edmund H. Durfee. Information Bundling in a Dynamic Environment. IJCAI Workshop on Economic Agents, Models, and Mechanisms, pages 52-61, August 2001.
- Christopher H. Brooks and Edmund H. Durfee. Congregating and Market Formation. Proceedings of the AAAI 2002 Spring Symposium on Collaborative Learning Agents. March, 2002.
- Christopher H. Brooks and Edmund H. Durfee. Congregation Formation in MultiAgent Systems. To appear in Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Journal, 2002.
- Christopher H. Brooks and Edmund H. Durfee. Congregating and Market Formation. To appear in Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, July, 2002.
Working papers:
- Brooks, Gazzale, Durfee, MacKie-Mason. A map of our current work on SPIPS.