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The Cost of Rational Agency

Moss, Scott (1999) The Cost of Rational Agency. [Departmental Technical Report]

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Abstract

The rational agency assumption limits systems to domains of application that have never been observed. Moreover, representing agents as being rational in the sense of maximising utility subject to some well specified constraints renders software systems virtually unscalable. These properties of the rational agency assumption are shown to be unnecessary in representations or analogies of markets. The demonstration starts with an analysis of how the rational agency assumption limits the applicability and scalability of the IBM information filetering economy. An unrestricted specification of the information filtering economy is developed from an analysis of the properties of markets as systems and the implementation of a model based on intelligent agents. This extended information filtering economy modelis used to test the analytical results on the scope for agents to act as intermediaries between human users and information sources.

Item Type:Departmental Technical Report
Keywords:rational agency, utility, rationality, agent-based models, information markets, market process, market structure, intermediaries, scalability, brokers, brokerage, economic rationality, rational economic man, bounded rationality, systems, applications, simulation, declarative language, SDML
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science > Dynamical Systems
Computer Science > Machine Learning
Philosophy > Philosophy of Science
Psychology > Social Psychology
ID Code:534
Deposited By: Moss, Scott
Deposited On:08 Apr 1999
Last Modified:11 Mar 2011 08:54

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