Self-Organization Amongst Non-Altruistic Agents for Distribution of Goods: Comparing Bartering and Currency Based Exchange

The distribution of a set of goods (such as finite allowed numbers of electronic goods, physical objects or fixed roles in an organization) amongst a set of agents with varying preferences is a complex combinatorial problem. While algorithms such as the Hungarian method exist to solve this type of Assignment Problem, these rely on central allocation with complete information about preferences, compliance by agents to allocations and altruistic acceptance of agents of their assignment for the greater goods. Unfortunately however, these assumptions are unrealistic in most operational settings. In this paper, we compare a number of economically inspired (specifically virtual currency based markets and bartering) approaches which allow the redistribution of goods amongst agents using self organization and do not require complete global information or centralized processing. Results show that in a range of scenarios 1) such techniques can get close to the optimal solutions produced by centralized algorithms, 2) their stability and optimality are radically affected by the heterogeneity of agent preferences for goods in the population. The results also confirm that bartering is clearly outperformed in most settings by more flexible currency based approaches.