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Autonomous trading agent design in the presence of tradeoffs

Published: 15 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In previous work we have introduced a principled methodology for systematically exploring the space of bidding strategies when agents participate in a significant number of simultaneous auctions, and thus finding an analytical solution is not possible. We decompose the problem into sub-problems and then use rigorous experimentation to determine the best partial strategies. In this paper we clarify and extend our methodology. We discuss our agent design for TAC 2003 and furthermore the changes to our agent as a result of the rule changes in TAC 2004. We also present a "full" set of experiments for determining an overall "optimal" strategy in the 2003 and 2004 Trading Agent Competition (TAC). Our agent was created by using the results of this methodology and has consistently been the top-scoring agent in several rounds of the TAC competition.

References

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P. Anthony, W. Hall, V. Dang, and N. R. Jennings. Autonomous agents for participating in multiple on-line auctions. In Proc IJCAI Workshop on E-Business and Intelligent Web, pages 54--64, 2001:]]
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T. Ito, N. Fukuta, T. Shintani, and K. Sycara. Biddingbot: a multiagent support system for cooperative bidding in multiple auctions. In Proceeding of the Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems, pages 399--400, July 2000.]]
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C. Preist, C. Bartolini, and I. Phillips. Algorithm design for agents which participate in multiple simultaneous auctions. In Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce III (LNAI), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pages 139--154, 2001.]]
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P. Stone, R. Schapire, M. Littman, J. Csirik, and D. McAllester. Attac-2001: A learning, autonomous bidding agent. In Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce IV. LNCS, volume 2531. Springer Verlag, Berlin., 2002.]]
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I. A. Vetsikas and B. Selman. A principled study of the design tradeoffs for autonomous trading agents. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, pages 473--480, 2003.]]
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I. A. Vetsikas and B. Selman. Bayes-nash equilibria for m-th price auctions with multiple closing times. ACM SIGecom Exchanges (to appear), 2005.]]
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M. P. Wellman, D. M. Reeves, K. M. Lochner, and Y. Vorobeychik. Price prediction in a trading agent competition. In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2004.]]
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M. P. Wellman, P. R. Wurman, K. O'Malley, R. Bangera, S. de Lin, D. Reeves, and W. E. Walsh. Designing the market game for TAC. IEEE Internet Computing, April, March/April 2001.]]

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '05: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Electronic commerce
August 2005
957 pages
ISBN:1595931120
DOI:10.1145/1089551
  • Conference Chairs:
  • Qi Li,
  • Ting-Peng Liang
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 August 2005

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Author Tags

  1. agent-mediated electronic commerce
  2. bidding agents
  3. eetermining bidding strategies
  4. electronic marketplaces
  5. simultaneous auctions

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Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%

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