This paper examine this question by constructing an artificial market in which autonomous agents trade for goods and then subjects this economy to a variety of trading rules.
Trade requires search, negotiation, and exchange, which are activities that absorb resources.
In this artificial market agents endowed with a stock of goods seek out partners, negotiate a price, and trade with the agent offering the best deal. Different trade networks are the imposed on the system by restricting the set of individuals with whom an agent can communicate. Comparing the path to the eventual equilibrium as well as the equilibrium characteristics of each trade network allows us to see how each system dealt with the tasks of search, negotiation, and exchange. Initially, all agents are free to trade with any individual in the global market. In such a world, global resources are optimally allocated with few trades, but only after a tremendous amount of search and negotiation.