The Catallaxy as a New Paradigm for the Design of Information Systems

Abstract

The future of networking will be shaped by open, heterogeneous and complex structures, consisting of many independent information systems, which may co-operate with other systems if advantageous, but usually work in an autonomous, self-interested and not necessarily co-operative way. In this article, we propose a novel approach for information system design (named Catallactic Information Systems (CIS)), that combines efforts from the fields of economics and distributed artificial intelligence to create distributed information systems, which consist of software agents with economic reasoning and evolutionary learning capabilities. A working software prototype for supply chain coordination shows the implementation of the concept and leads to a discussion of promising application areas and known shortcomings of the approach.

Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Agent-based Computational Economics, Supply Chain Management, Catallactic Information Systems, Catallaxy

JEL Classification: L86