As the other chapters in this volume attest, the market-based approach offers a useful way to conceptualize and analyze distributed control problems, as well as to design and implement actual distributed control systems. For the past few years, I have been exploring this approach not only as a methodology for solving particular distributed control problems, but also as a generic programming paradigm for the development of distributed systems based on these methods. By a programming paradigm, I mean that the exercise of defining a computational market leads to the specification of a procedural solution to the underlying allocation problem facing that market. I call this approach "market-oriented programming".
