Society · Economics
AttentionMarkets
Pricing bandwidth to filter spam
Definition
Mechanism
Agents bid for priority in message queues. High-stakes messages pay to jump the line; spam is priced out by congestion pricing. Queue manager runs continuous auction: incoming Signals include a Value bid, manager sorts by bid/urgency ratio, losers wait or increase bid. Price discovery via second-price auction prevents overpayment. Revenue redistributed to queue participants or burned. It instantiates the ContinuousResourceAuction mechanism to continuously price bandwidth availability based on network congestion.
Preconditions
- Limited processing bandwidth
- Multiple information sources
- Liquid currency for bidding
Postconditions
- Resources allocated to highest-bid signals
- Market price established for current tick
Invariants
- Attention supply is rivalrous (Bandwidth < Demand).
- Price reflects aggregate demand (Congestion Pricing).
- Bid Monotonicity: Higher bid guarantees strictly better or equal placement.
- Clearing: Messages with Bid < CurrentPrice are dropped or buffered.
Risks
Failure modes
Plutocratic Blockage
Wealthy agents monopolize bandwidth, silencing critical low-budget signals (e.g., emergency alerts).
Starvation
Low-value signals never clear the queue during high congestion.
Relationships
Builds on
Composes with
Algorithmic pricing for rivalrous resources
Nothing in this library builds on this pattern yet.