Within a company, employees are given a certain number of tokens per year to spend on computing resources. The more urgent a user deems the need, the more tokens he can bid for use of the equipment. In a broader market, resources could be offered online to the highest cash bidder.

While the concept of shared resources isn't new, HP's convergence of the principles of two disciplines, economics and technology, to develop Tycoon is.

"Part of the reason why it has taken so long for it to get off the ground is that economists lack the expertise to [build a system] ... and computer scientists lack the understanding of incentives and organizational structure to make a system that can do these kinds of things," explains Kevin Lai, a scientist at HP's Information Dynamics Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., and a key developer on the project.

Bernardo Huberman is credited for bringing the eclectic group together back in 2004. "You need [economists] interested in solving concrete and real problems," explains Huberman, senior HP fellow and director of the Information Dynamics Lab. "Also, you need people from computer science with enough vision that they want to do something different."

But it was Lai who mediated between economists and computer scientists and even intrigued visiting scientists who heard the buzz about Tycoon and wanted to offer their input.