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Paper: Backpressure Economics

Capacity-Constrained Monetary Flow Control for Agent Economies


This paper presents the formal theory, protocol design, and evaluation of Backpressure Economics (BPE). It adapts the Tassiulas–Ephremides backpressure routing algorithm to monetary flows in multi-agent economies.

Citation

If you use this work, please cite: Backpressure Economics: Capacity-Constrained Monetary Flow Control for Agent Economies, 2026.

Sections

# Section Description
0 Abstract 250-word summary of contributions and results
1 Introduction Motivation, problem statement, and contributions
2 Background Related work in backpressure routing, pricing, demurrage
3 Formal Model Network model definition and Lyapunov analysis setup
4 Throughput Optimality Proof of throughput-optimal allocation
5 Protocol Design Implementation on Superfluid GDA
6 Security Analysis Sybil resistance, MEV protection, slashing
7 Evaluation Simulation results and benchmarks
8 Discussion Implications, limitations, future work
9 Conclusion Summary and outlook

Figures

The paper includes simulation results visualized as:

  • Convergence - Allocation efficiency over time
  • Shock response - Recovery from node-kill events
  • EWMA sweep - Sensitivity analysis of smoothing parameter \(\alpha\)
  • Buffer utilization - Overflow escrow dynamics
  • Sybil cost - Stake fragmentation analysis

LaTeX Source

The full LaTeX source is available in docs/paper/ for compilation with pdflatex + bibtex.