A idealized free market is that of selfish rational agents competing (with a few extra condition I'm skipping). I'm moderately confident this could work pretty ok in the absence of "general" (if such a thing exists) or perhaps human "intelligence", but I'm not familiar enough with simulations of markets to be certain.

Eric Baum's papers, among others, show this kind of thing applied to AI. There doesn't seem to have been much followup.

Comparative Ecology: A Computational Perspective compares this idea to the human economy and biological evolution and says the idealized computer version ought to be, well, more ideal as an optimization process.