One realm in which economically-motivated software agents may play an important role is information filtering. Consumers, who are typically interested in only a very small subset of the categories, can avoid the high cost of receiving and examining a torrent of mostly irrelevant articles by subscribing to one or more brokers who purchase selected articles from the source and resell them to consumers. In such an environment, different consumers will be interested in different categories.
Consumers hold a relevant article to be worth V , and an irrelevant one to be worth nothing.
Broker b experiences a cost for delivering an article to each consumer. Consumers choose the set of brokers to which they subscribe, with brokers retaining the right to refuse subscriptions from consumers who appear unprofitable. Consumers seek to subscribe only to brokers whose selection of categories overlaps well with their own interests. Given the goals and capabilities of the consumers and brokers, we wish to understand the evolution of the brokers' prices, category selections, and profits and the consumers' broker selections and utilities. For simplicity, assume that the aggregate demand for each category is exactly the same.