The Link between Autonomy and Organisation in Multiagent Systems

Market-based approaches have a long tradition in supporting of task-assignment multiagent systems. Such systems consist of customer agents with jobs to assign, and provider agents that have the resources to perform these jobs. Jobs can be complex in the sense that they require the collaboration of several provider agents. We present a set of organisational forms of collaboration between firms that have the potential to increase performance through the structure they impose. This gain of structure, which comes with a loss of autonomy of the individual agents, is especially valuable in settings where communication has to be limited.