Glossary

Autonomous Economic Agent (AEA)

Moderate

A solution (software entity) by Fetch.ai and IOTA foundation that can take actions without external input using its own intelligence for the economic benefit of the owner.

What Is an Autonomous Economic Agent (AEA)?

Fetch.ai is an artificial intelligence-based blockchain platform that uses AEA to connect with other AI applications for processing real-time data and taking actions based on that. 

AEAs from fetch.ai connect with IOTA Streams, enabling the sharing and retrieval of real-time data to allow economic agents to act autonomously. One of the most common applications of AEAs could be financial markets where rapid and constant actions need to be taken for higher profits.

Autonomous Economic Agents aren’t APIs or smart contracts but they follow some rules autonomously without external input. Fetch.ai allows developers to create their own AEAs on the blockchain.

The term economic agent is commonly applied to human individuals, firms, or governments.

A typical example of an economic agent is a person engaged in some economic activity such as the purchase of consumer goods and services or the sale of a financial asset. More generally, an economic agent may be defined as any individual, group, or entity that makes decisions on the allocation of scarce resources.

However, in recent years, the term has been applied more widely to include non-human agents, such as bots. With its increasing use in this context, it is useful to examine the concept of an autonomous economic agent more closely.

The very definition of an autonomous agent implies that they are capable of self-governance and control over their own actions. In addition, since an autonomous agent operates independently from external control and supervision, it must have its own goals which it pursues through self-generated means.

Professional economists will immediately recognize these characteristics as the building blocks for any economic theory that deals with rational behavior by economic actors. For example, a central tenet in neo-classical economics is the assumption that all economic agents are rational actors who pursue their own personal goals without any external guidance or influence from outside sources such as government regulations or other external constraints.