TY  - GEN
ID  - cogprints534
UR  - http://cogprints.org/534/
A1  - Moss, Scott
TI  - The Cost of Rational Agency
Y1  - 1999/04//
N2  - 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.
AV  - public
KW  - rational agency
KW  -  utility
KW  -  rationality
KW  -  agent-based models
KW  -  information markets
KW  -  market process
KW  -  market structure
KW  -  intermediaries
KW  -  scalability
KW  -  brokers
KW  -  brokerage
KW  -  economic rationality
KW  -  rational economic man
KW  -  bounded rationality
KW  -  systems
KW  -  applications
KW  -  simulation
KW  -  declarative language
KW  -  SDML
ER  -

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