MarketBayes: A Distributed, Market-Based Bayesian Network

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 13

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 13

AAAI-96 Student Abstracts

This paper presents initial work on a system called MarketBayes, a computational market economy where distributed agents trade in uncertain propositions. For any Bayesian network, we have defined a corresponding economy of goods, consumers and producers that essentially "computes" the same information. Although our research thus far has only verified the existence of a market structure capable of Bayesian calculations, our hope is that such a system may address a variety of interesting problems of distributed uncertain reasoning. For example, the economic framework should be well suited for belief aggregation, since the bids of numerous agents with varying beliefs, confidence levels and wealth are concisely "summarized" in the going prices of goods.