Agentic Markets Workshop

This is a workshop proposal, targeting the intersection of Agentic AI and Market/Incentives Design.Workshop Summary: Recent developments in foundation models have paved the way for the wide adoption of AI agents that interact with humans and each other. The cooperation and safety of those models are a necessity, especially as they gain autonomy and participate in high stakes markets as autonomous systems, making those markets "agentic." However, those agentic markets face significant challenges as most existing methods at improving their performance and robustness presume critical use of policy and regulation, which are insufficient and too slow for an economy driven by a mixture of human and algorithmic participants, especially in zero-shot scenarios.As we advance towards an AI-centric future, the emergence of markets, mechanisms, and mediation platforms dedicated to preference elicitation and resource allocation for those highly agentic systems is inevitable. We expect many existing multi-agent security and cooperation approaches to break in high-stakes situations where hyper-adversarial incentives are present. This is compounded by the emergence of complexity from AI interactions, exemplified by intricate interdependencies within agentic systems.Given this complexity, how can we fully understand and assess the associated risks? How can we improve the performance and robustness of these markets? It is essential to draw lessons from traditional markets with less agentic AI (e.g., finance), to achieve robust incentives and economic security in a post-foundation model world. We recognize the need to incorporate principles of cryptography and robust market design. However, the sufficiency of these approaches is not certain. We aim to identify the missing elements and treat the sudy of market design in presence of agentic AI as a scientific discipline.This workshop seeks to amalgamate insights from economics, mechanism design, game theory, and, crucially, real-world financial markets expertise for algorithmic agents to better prepare us for the inevitable mass adoption of agentic AI on mission critical jobs. We aspire for this workshop to enlighten participants about new agentic-driven risks and opportunities, fostering disruptive collaborations among economists, market stakeholders, and AI researchers.ICML is the perfect venue for this workshop as it’s the focal point for a wide range of AI researchers and industry practitioners who have informed opinions on agentic systems. This interdisciplinary assembly is crucial for stimulating discussions that blend market design and economics with practical insights from the auctions and finance sector. We envision ICML as the perfect platform to nurture a scientific understanding of agentic markets. It is also the prime setting for enabling influential decision-makers and researchers to exchange knowledge and receive feedback, thereby facilitating impactful changes in the real world.