Shopbot Economics
Shopbot Economics
复制标题
购物机器人经济学
DOI：
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发表时间：
1999
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
A. Greenwald
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
J. Kephart;A. Greenwald
Shopbot是一种互联网代理，可以自动搜索与商品和服务的价格和质量有关的信息。随着购物机器人的流行和使用不断增加，人们可能会认为，搜索成本的降低将显著改变市场行为。我们通过提出、分析和模拟一个模型来探索购物机器人对市场动态的潜在影响，该模型在形式上类似于经济学家研究价格分散现象的一些模型。然而，我们方法的基本假设和方法是不同的，因为我们的最终目标不是解释人类的经济行为，而是设计经济软件代理并研究他们的行为。我们研究了由购物机器人和其他代表买家和卖家的代理人组成的市场，其中(I)搜索成本是非线性的，(Ii)部分买家不使用搜索机制，以及(Iii)购物机器人出于经济动机，对其信息服务进行战略性定价，以最大化自己的利润。在这些条件下，我们发现市场可以表现出各种迄今未被观察到的动力学行为，包括复杂的极限环和几种买家搜索策略的共存。我们还证明，向买家收取价格信息的购物机器人可以操纵市场，为自己谋取利益，有时会无意中让买家和卖家受益。
Shopbots are Internet agents that automatically search for information pertaining to the price and quality of goods and services. As the prevalence and usage of shopbots continues to increase, one might expect the resultant reduction in search costs to alter market behavior significantly. We explore the potential impact of shopbots upon market dynamics by proposing, analyzing, and simulating a model that is similar in form to some that have been studied by economists investigating the phenomenon of price dispersion. However, the underlying assumptions and methodology of our approach are different, since our ultimate goal is not to explain human economic behavior, but rather to design economic software agents and study their behavior. We study markets consisting of shopbots and other agents representing buyers and sellers in which (i) search costs are nonlinear, (ii) some portion of the buyer population makes no use of search mechanisms, and (iii) shopbots are economically motivated, strategically pricing their information services so as to maximize their own profits. Under these conditions, we find that the market can exhibit a variety of hitherto unobserved dynamical behaviors, including complex limit cycles and the co-existence of several buyer search strategies. We also demonstrate that a shopbot that charges buyers for price information can manipulate markets to its own advantage, sometimes inadvertently benefitting buyers and sellers.