Shop 'til you drop I: Market trading interactions as adaptive behavior

market, economics, trading, agent, adaptive behaviour We argue that human economic interactions, particularly bargaining and trading in market environments, can be considered as adaptive behaviors. Moreover, the tools and techniques of adaptive behavior research could be profitably employed to build predictive models of existing or planned market systems. In addition to applications in economic modelling, “trading animats ” could find use in market-based resource-allocation and control, and in internet-based commerce. Despite these potential applications, we note that there is a near-total absence of papers in the adaptive behaviour literature (and also in the artificial life literature) that deal with autonomous agents capable of exhibiting trading behaviors. After a brief overview of core concepts in microeconomics, we summarize work i