The remarkable recent story of Kyle MacDonald who, by means of a sequence of bartering exchanges between July 2005 and July 2006, managed to trade a small red paperclip for a full sized house in the town of Kipling Saskatchewan has inspired interesting debates about the nature of such feats and questions as to how they might come about. While bartering is arguably the world's oldest form of trade, there are still cases such as this which surprise us. Although there are many factors to consider in Kyle's achievement, his feat raises basic questions about the nature of the trades made and to what extent they are repeatable.

In this paper we provide an intuitive model for the type of trading environment experienced Kyle and study its consequences in order to analyze in particular whether such trading phenomena require altruistic agents to be present in the environment and extending the experience with multiple goal seeking agents.