Price of Anarchy of First-Price Auctions in Agentic Markets

Shubhendu Trivedi, Jacob Eisenstein, Alekh Agarwal, Ian Gemp, Michael Kaisers +1

An agentic market is a decentralized serving-time market where AI agents bid to claim each user prompt. An agent's bid is based on its expected value for the prompt, which is the expectation of the reward for its response minus its inference costs. First-price auctions (FPAs), in which the highest bidder pays its bid and receives the prompt, are a natural way to allocate prompts in such a market, since they are simple and transparent to run, and do not require central knowledge of private capabilities and costs. However, FPAs are not truthful: participants may bid less than their true value in the hope of a larger profit, and the prompt may then be allocated to someone other than the bidder who values it the most. This welfare loss is quantified by the $\textit{price-of-anarchy}$ (PoA). In this paper, we argue that agentic markets are likely to possess features that reduce the price-of-anarchy. The first is a $\textit{competitive floor}$, which occurs when multiple bidders usually value the prompt above some baseline share of the optimal welfare (e.g., because the best models are often distilled into cheaper alternatives, which perform similarly). We show that competition among…