Evolution of Market Geographic Structure Based on Agent Technology
基于Agent的市场空间结构演化

This paper studies the evolution of geographic market formation. The way agents utilize information from trading history is crucial to the evolution process and the emergence of geographic market structures. Three ways to utilize information are proposed in this paper. Two out of the three are in uttermost conditions namely public information sharing, personal information keeping; and one is in the middle of the former two in the sense of the degree of information sharing, namely information communication within confined groups. Models, with learning, memory, and cooperation mechanisms, are established to study which information sharing mechanism benefits central market formation and which one does not. Results show that stabilized global spatial structure can emerge from simple localized interaction between agents without central planning or any initial biased spatial configuration. When there is public information sharing or when information is well communicated within groups, the geographic market structure will evolve from distributed markets to centralized markets; while when there is just personal information keeping without a common memory, no centralized market emerges.