Re: Another question about self-paging

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 13:28 +0200, Paavo Parkkinen wrote:
> On Sun, 30.10.2005 at 16:45 -0500, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> > No, except in the sense that you can look at all of the existing
> > publications on market-based scheduling and the like, and after a while
> > you will conclude that none of them really solve the problem. The
> > underlying issue is that the resources are not infinitely subdivisible,
> > so the market structure does not exhibit continuously differential
> > pricing, and at a certain low point items fall out of sponsorship in
> > ways that the individual players are unable to predict.
> 
> I don't think I completely understand what you are saying. Could you
> explain this a bit more?

Yes, but this is a long and involved discussion, and I don't have time
to commit to another long discussion at this point.

The short version is that the customary view of microeconomics assumes
that pricing for all items in the market is continuous, and that the
propagation of pricing changes across the supply chain is relatively
rapid and free of friction. Neither assumption holds in computational
systems.

I would suggest that you need to read a business school case study
example from the Wharton school known as "the beer game". It explains
why, in a system of friction and quantified pricing, an economically
perfect actor can nonetheless go bankrupt. You may be able to find it
online. If not, ask me and I will dig up a reference to it for you.

shap