Cognitive mapping is a qualitative decision modeling technique developed over twenty years ago by political scientists, which continues to see occasional use in social science and decision-aiding applications. In this paper, I show how cognitive maps can be viewed in the context of more recent...

The allocation of discrete, complementary resources is a fundamental problem in economics and of direct interest to e-commerce applications. In this paper we establish that competitive equilibrium bundle prices always exist that support the efficient allocation in discrete resource allocation...

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...

Computer automation has the potential, just starting to be realized, of transforming the design and operation of markets, and the behaviors of agents trading in them. We discuss the possibilities for automating markets, presenting a broad conceptual framework covering resource allocation as well...

The emph{securities market} is the fundamental theoretical framework in economics and finance for resource allocation under uncertainty. Securities serve both to reallocate risk and to disseminate probabilistic information. emph{Complete} securities markets - which contain one security for every...

We consider the problem of belief aggregation: given a group of individual agents with probabilistic beliefs over a set of uncertain events, formulate a sensible consensus or aggregate probability distribution over these events. Researchers have proposed many aggregation methods, although on the...