Markets of Minds: A 51-Billion-State Economy of Intelligence

Abstract

When intelligence is shared, reasoning becomes a constrained allocation problem. In a population of agents with limited access to expert models, an intervention can benefit its recipient yet still be a poor use of shared capacity if another feasible intervention has greater expected value. Assistance must therefore be evaluated through both its marginal benefit and the opportunity cost induced by budgets, access, scarcity, and service capacity. To this end, we introduce Markets of Minds, a framework for allocating expert reasoning across agents before expert outputs are observed. For each feasible agent-service pair, the framework estimates the expected gain from assistance relative to the agent's default continuation, explicitly separating repair benefit from regression risk, and jointly clears assistance contracts under shared resource constraints. We then study this problem in a dependency-aware agent economy with 51.2 billion addressable persona-market states spanning capabilities, cognitive budgets, provider access, scarcity, and network roles. These dependencies couple allocation feasibility across agents rather than the outcome of a fixed contract. Empirically, in a matched replay of 240 cases under a common 30% assistance quota, the frozen allocator reaches 85.42% task-level persona adherence versus 73.86% for equal-capacity random allocation, a gain of 11.56 percentage points. The results show that assistance value is heterogeneous and can be negative, and that scarcity changes which interventions are worth purchasing. Together, these findings motivate a population-level view of intelligence where the value of assistance depends not only on what it can achieve, but also on which alternative uses of scarce cognitive capacity it displaces.