Software Agents and the Information Economy
	Humans are on the verge of losing their status as the sole economic
	species on the planet. In private laboratories and in the Internet
	laboratory, researchers and developers are creating a variety of
	autonomous, economically-motivated software agents endowed with
	algorithms for maximizing profit or utility.  Many economic software
	agents will function as miniature businesses, purchasing information
	inputs from other agents, combining and refining them into information
	goods and services, and selling them to humans or other agents.  Their
	mutual interactions will form the information economy: a complex
	economic web of information goods and services that will adapt to the
	ever-changing needs of people and agents. The information economy will
	be the largest multi-agent system ever conceived, and an integral part
	of the world's economy.
	One cannot predict how this new world economy will behave simply by
	extrapolating from hundreds of years of economies in which humans have
	been the only players. Economic software agents differ from their
	human counterparts in several ways. They operate more quickly on more
	up-to-date and accurate information, yet on the other hand they have
	much less world experience and common sense. In an effort to both
	understand and design the macroeconomic behavior of the future
	information economy, we have simulated several different markets and
	economies populated with economic software agents employing a variety
	of plausible pricing and bidding algorithms. I will present several
	interesting macroeconomic behaviors that we have observed and
	analyzed, including cyclical price wars and complex strategic
	interactions that are reminiscent of the prisoner's dilemma. I will
	then discuss how insights gained from our studies can be used to
	design not just market mechanisms, but the agents themselves -- an
	opportunity that traditionally has not been available to economists.