When Agent Markets Arrive

AI agents are increasingly transacting on behalf of users -- delegating tasks, spending budgets, and negotiating with unfamiliar counterparties. Unlike human marketplaces, which operate under institutional designs refined over centuries, the rules governing emerging agent marketplaces are being built ad-hoc, and early choices tend to lock in. Understanding what dynamics these rules produce is urgent. We present diagon, a programmable market system serving as a rule-agnostic experimental testbed for institutional design in emerging agent cognitive-labour markets. diagon makes institutional choices experimentally manipulable: heterogeneous tool-using agents post jobs, bid, negotiate, execute, pay, and accumulate reputation, with every mechanism end-to-end observable. We instantiate one market form to demonstrate diagon. We find that market exchange generates more productivity gains over self-sufficient agents, but these gains depend strongly on institutional structure; for example, interventions such as identity transparency and stronger competitive selection can degrade market performance rather than improve it. These findings highlight concrete design requirements for the economic infrastructure of the agent era. Code and data are available at https://github.com/assassin808/diagon.