Managing Large Scale Computational Markets

General equilibrium theory has been proposed for resource allocation in computational markets. The basic procedure is that agents submit bids and that a resource (re)allocation is performed when a set of prices (one for each commodity) is found such that supply meets demand for each commodity. For successful implementation of large markets based on general equilibrium theory, ee-cient algorithms for nding the equilibrium are required. We discuss some drawbacks of current algorithms for large scale equilibrium markets and present a novel distributed algorithm, CoTree, which deals with the most important problems. CoTree is communication sparse, fast in adapting to preference changes of a few agents, have minimal requirements on local data, and is easy to implement.