A significant portion of trade is already conducted electronically, and markets are increasingly going electronic. This presents a wonderful opportunity for AI: electronic marketplaces provide new exciting research questions, and AI can significantly help generate more efficient market outcomes and processes.
One example is expressive competition, a generalization of combinatorial auctions. The idea is to let buyers and sellers (human or software) express demand and supply at a drastically finer granularity than in traditional markets—much like having the expressiveness of human-to-human negotiation, but in a structured electronic setting where demand and supply are algorithmically matched. A combination of AI and operations research techniques have recently made expressive competition possible, and today almost all expressive competition markets are cleared using sophisticated tree search algorithms. Tens of billions of dollars of trade have been cleared with this technology, generating billions of dollars of additional value into the world by better matching of supply and demand.
Less mature, but promising, roles of AI include the following: