The Atomic Market:

Today’s electronic marketplaces are closed, centralized and inflexible.

We propose a new type of electronic marketplace, which we refer to as an “atomic market.” Atomic markets differ from today’s electronic marketplaces in that they are (1) open-ended, (2) decentralized and (3) component-based. The atomic market supports short-lived markets created around the individual components of everyday transactions. The traders in an atomic market are agents, software that acts as a proxy for an actual buyer and seller.

The atomic market allows expressive interactions among trading agents, leading to productive, automated agent-based transactions. The focus is on the technical infrastructure for atomic marketplaces, specifically the use of logic as a basis for the decomposition of transactions and the negotiations between the different agents.

The Atomic Market

S.M. Thesis, submitted August, 2001 to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences:
Peer to Peer Transactions in Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce (1.7mb PDF)