Spontaneous Specialization in a Free-Market Economy of Agents

In a free-market economy of software agents, information is produced, traded, and consumed by vast numbers of autonomous , self-motivated agents. An essential task in this economy is the retailing or brokering of information, whereby information is gathered from the right producers and distributed to the right consumers. This paper investigates one crucial aspect of a broker's dynamical behavior, its ability to specialize|i.e., to carve out a market niche for itself in a highly dynamic, potentially competitive environment|in the context of a simple information ltering economy.

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