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Abstract:
Software agents will personalize smart devices to act autonomously on behalf of their human owner. In dynamical electronic commerce environments, these agents could buy and sell goods and services from each other, without using a central market maker. From a system perspective, this creates a decentralized and continuously changing multi-agent system with the need for coordination of supply and demand. In this article we show how such a multi-agent system may be decentrally coordinated while software agents bargain with each other under the constraints of incomplete information, non-equilibrium and time pressure. The agents adapt to a changing environment with an evolutionary learning mechanism. It can be shown that the multi-agent system as a whole shows emergent coordination in absence of a centralized coordination institution.