We investigate the possibility of endowing mobile agents with a limited amount of currency with which to purchase computing services from hosts and other resource owners. Resource owners could then distribute the proceeds to their local users to launch new mobile agents. If the agents' currency is exchangeable for others, computation then becomes a far more liquid commodity. Administrative domains may temporarily expand their computing resources by buying computing resources from other domains. Tieing computation to a useful currency eliminates denial of service attacks.
Hosts are free to raise or lower prices to deter or attract customer agents.
In this manner, network load is both temporally and spatially balanced. Market systems implicitly distribute the responsibility of resource allocation among the participants. This is desirable given that one of the motives for using mobile-agent systems is to distribute computation throughout the environment. The grand vision of the research is to create a safe open mobile-agent system where it is to a resource owner's advantage to allow controlled access to outside uses. Programs could travel the world looking for their data, compute at locations to minimize the impact on their environments, and possibly sell their services to sites or other agents.