Bidding mechanisms for data allocation in multi-agent environments

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998. We propose a bidding mechanism for data allocation in environments of self-motivated data servers with no common preferences and no central controller. The model considers situations where each server is concerned with the data stored locally, but does not have preferences concerning the exact storage location of data stored in remote servers. We considered situations of complete, as well as incomplete, information, and formally proved that our method is stable and yields honest bids. In the case of complete information, we also proved that the results obtained by the bidding approach are always better than the results obtained by the static allocation policy currently used for data allocation for servers in distributed systems. In the case of incomplete information, we demonstrated, using simulations, that the quality of the bidding mechanism is, on average, better than that of the static policy.