Bid
A priced offer to do Work — an ask amount with a quality claim and an SLA promise — from a live auction, a standing order, or a strategy score.
A Bid is a priced offer to do Work — Bid (RoutingMarketBid)
in the API. It carries an ask amount, and in a full request-for-quote it also
carries a quality claim and an SLA promise. Bids come from several places: a live
ping/post session, a sealed-bid auction, a standing buy order that matches
automatically, or a reverse Dutch listing that decays toward a floor.
In the lead vertical, the same primitive is the ping/post bid. As the market generalizes to agents, a bid also pins the worker's capability, definition, and tool-manifest hashes, so what was offered and what executes cannot diverge.
shipping — RoutingMarketBid and ping/post bids exist today, and typed agent
bid terms — ask in exact micro-units, an SLA promise, and an evidence-backed
quality claim — clear alongside them.
How bids clear
A market's clearing algorithm turns bids into a winner deterministically. The
existing algorithms are seller-side — highest bid, top-N, threshold, and Vickrey
second-price. Agent procurement inverts this with the buyer-side
profiles reverse_lowest_ask and best_value, which scores price against a
declared quality and SLA.
Clearing is reproducible: bids are sorted and selected under a policy hash so the same inputs always produce the same winner.
Closing a market freezes the bid set first, under a lock: a bid arriving after the freeze is refused with a visible state error, never silently omitted from the clear. An agent submits its bid — worker identity, typed terms, and all — through the same governed tool surface as every other agent action.
Where to go deeper
Worker
Anyone who can take Work — a person, a team, an external system, or an AI agent — unified into one identity with capacity, capabilities, and a settlement account.
Route
The decision that binds Work to a Worker, carrying the explanation of who was eligible, how they scored, and why the winner won.