{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Efficiency and Equilibrium in Task Allocation Economies with Hierarchical Dependencies","authors":[{"name":"William E. Walsh","slug":"william-e-walsh","given":"William E.","family":"Walsh","affiliation":""},{"name":"Michael P. Wellman","slug":"michael-p-wellman","given":"Michael P.","family":"Wellman","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"We analyze economic efficiency and equilibrium properties in decentralized task allocation problems involving hierarchical dependencies and resource contention. We bound the inefficiency of a type of approximate equilibrium in proportion to the number of agents and the bidding parameters in a particular market protocol. This protocol converges to an approximate equilibrium with respect to all agents, except those which may acquire unneeded inputs. We introduce a decommitment phase to allow such agents to decommit from their input contracts. Experiments indicate that the augmented market protocol produces highly efficient allocations on average.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/75","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/0075.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/75.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/bibtex/75","volume":{"slug":"1999","title":"Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1999","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/","year":1999,"location":"Stockholm, Sweden","dates":"","editors":"Thomas Dean","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Distributed AI","track":"Distributed AI","number":75,"pages":{"first":520,"last":525},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}