Shop ‘Til You Drop I: Market Trading Interactions as Adaptive Behavior

We argue that human economic interactions, particularly bargaining and trading in market environments, can be consideredas adaptive behaviors. Moreover, the tools and techniques of adaptive behavior research could be pro tably employed to build predictive models of existing or planned market systems. In addition to applications in economic modeling, \trading animats" could nd use in market-based resource-allocation and control, and in internetbased commerce. Despite these potential applications, we note that there is a near-total absence of papers in the adaptive behavior literature (and also in the arti cial life literature) that deal with autonomous agents capable of exhibiting trading behaviors. After a brief overview of core concepts in microeconomics, we summarize work in experimental economics where human trading behavior is studied under laboratory conditions. We propose that such experiments could and should be used as `benchmarks' for evaluating and comparing di erent architectures and strategies for trading animats. This paper is, essentially, a position paper: a manifesto calling the attention of the adaptive behavior research community to an entire eld of problems that it has apparently so far ignored. In a companion paper [18], we present empirical results from simulations that invite a Braitenberg-style eliminativematerialism perspective on the dynamics of experimental retail markets.

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