---
title: "Efficiency and Equilibrium in Task Allocation Economies with Hierarchical Dependencies"
authors:
  - "William E. Walsh"
  - "Michael P. Wellman"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/75"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/0075.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1999
pages: "520-525"
track: "Distributed AI"
keywords:
---

# Efficiency and Equilibrium in Task Allocation Economies with Hierarchical Dependencies

William E. Walsh, Michael P. Wellman

*Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 520-525.

## 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.