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A novel approach to allocating and sharing communication and computational resources in a distributed system is described. The approach, which is based on concepts drawn from microeconomics, uses algorithms that are competitive rather than cooperative. The effectiveness of these concepts is demonstrated by describing an economy that improves the performance of a distributed system by implementing load balancing. In this economy, competition sets prices for the resources in the system. Jobs complete for the resources by issuing bids, and the resource allocation decisions are made through auctions held by the processors. The benefits of the method include limited complexity and algorithms that are intrinsically decentralized and modular. Simulation studies show that these economies achieve substantial performance benefits.>
Ferguson et al. (Mon,) studied this question.