On resource-oriented multi-commodity market computations

Abstract

In search for general equilibrium in multi-commodity markets, price-oriented schemes are normally used. That is, a set of prices (one price for each commodity) is updated until supply meets demand for each commodity. In some cases such an approach is very inefficient and a resource-oriented scheme can be highly competitive. In a resource-oriented scheme the allocations are updated until the market equilibrium is found. It is well known that in a two-commodity market resource-oriented schemes are possible. We show that resource-oriented algorithms can be used for the general multi-commodity case as well, and present and analyze a specific algorithm. The algorithm has been implemented and some performance properties, for a specific example, are presented.