The allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents, that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation, is an exciting area of research at the interface of Computer Science and Economics. This paper is a survey of some of the most salient issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation. In particular, we review various languages to represent the preferences of agents over alternative allocations of resources as well as different measures of social welfare to assess the overall quality of an allocation. We also discuss pertinent issues regarding allocation procedures and present important complexity results. Our presentation of theoretical issues is complemented by a discussion of software packages for the simulation of agent-based market places. We also introduce four major application areas for Multiagent Resource Allocation, namely industrial procurement, sharing of satellite resources, manufacturing control, and grid computing.

Abstract. Computational social choice is an interdisciplinary field of study at the interface of social choice theory and computer science, promoting an exchange of ideas in both directions. On the one hand, it is concerned with the application of techniques developed in computer science, such as complexity analysis or algorithm design, to the study of social choice mechanisms, such as voting procedures or fair division algorithms. On the other hand, computational social choice is concerned with importing concepts from social choice theory into computing. For instance, the study of preference aggregation mechanisms is also very relevant to multiagent systems. In this short paper we give a general introduction to computational social choice, by proposing a taxonomy of the issues addressed by this discipline, together with some illustrative examples and an (incomplete) bibliography.

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Distributed mechanisms for allocating indivisible goods are mechanisms lacking central control, in which agents can locally agree on deals to exchange some of the goods in their possession. We study convergence properties for such distributed mechanisms when used as fair division procedures. Specifically, we identify sets of assumptions under which any sequence of deals meeting certain conditions can be shown to converge to a proportionally fair allocation and to an envy-free allocation, respectively. We also introduce an extension of the basic framework where agents are vertices of a graph limiting which agents can interact with each other and prove a similar convergence result for envy-freeness in this context. Finally, when not all assumptions guaranteeing envy-freeness are satisfied, we may want to minimise the degree of envy exhibited by an outcome. To this end, we introduce a generic framework for measuring the degree of envy in a society and establish the computational complexity of checking whether a given scenario allows for a deal that is beneficial to every agent involved and that will reduce envy.