This involves modeling and understanding the various tasks that are required to support Digital Libraries. There are several reasons why this form of modeling helps in understanding the interfaces between the various elements of Digital Libraries. The novelty introduced by the economic approach is not only in modeling large decentralized, autonomous systems, but also in designing efficient systems that account naturally for user QoS requirements, and optimally allocate resources for the various services in Digital Libraries. Commercial DLSystems buy works from various publishers and authors, and provide services to a variety of users for a fee. The DLSystems not only price information but also price QoS to access the information.
Pricing is based on the user demand, and users represent their demands through agents.
The prices remain fixed every time-interval, assuming that time is divided into intervals. For example, a time-interval could be a 6 hours in a day. The time-intervals are decided by each DLSystem independently based on the market demand. The suppliers provide storage, access and local indexing services. From now on, we refer to Information Agents as agents.