mitchell@RED.RUTGERS.EDU (Tom) (01/22/86)
[Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] ML Colloquium talk Title: Market Traders: Intelligent Distributed Systems In an Open World Speaker: Prof. Spencer Star Laval University, Quebec Date: Friday, Jan 24 Time: 11 am Location: Hill 423 Professor Spencer Star is a computer scientist/economist who works on simulating economic markets. He will be spending the coming year on sabbatical at Rutgers to work on incorporating a machine learning component into his current market simulations. He is visiting now in order to meet the department and to get some feedback on his current research ideas on learning. Below is part of an abstract from his recent paper. [...] -Tom Mitchell Market Traders: Intelligent Distributed Systems In an Open World Although markets are at the heart of modern microeconomics, there has been relatively little attention paid to disequilibriun states and to the decision-making rules used by traders within markets. I am interested in the procedures that traders use to determine when and how much they will bid, how they adapt their behaviour to a changing market environment, and the effects of their adaptive behaviour on the market's disequilibrium path. This paper reports on research to study these questions with the aid of a computer program that represents a market with interacting and independent knowledge-based traders. The program is callled TRADER. In a series of experiments with TRADER I find that market efficiency requires a minimum number of intelligent traders with a capacity to learn, but when their knowledge is reflected in the market bids and asks, naive traders can enter the markets and sometimes do better than the expert traders. Moreover, the entrance of naive traders in a market that is already functioning efficiently does not degrade the market's performance. Since learning by independent agents appears to be a key element in understanding and using open systems, the focus of future research will be on studying learing and adaptive processes by intelligent agents in open systems.