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Designing sniping agents

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Abstract

Sniping agents are increasingly being deployed to assist bidders in acquiring items in online auctions. This paper reviews the extant auction literature and proposes an overarching sniping agent design framework that could potentially increase the commercial viability of snipping agents. For better alignment between the functions of sniping agents and the needs of human bidders, we review existing literature based on three fundamentals: (1) knowledge about human bidder behavior, (2) awareness of the product(s) desired by a bidder, and (3) an understanding of the research on bidding agents and auction design. The output of this review is the explicit consideration of iterative combinatorial auction agent design, fuzzy set representation of the bidder’s preferences and dynamic derivation of bidding strategies according to the progress of ongoing auctions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Chuan-Hoo Tan

  2. Department of Information Systems, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Hock-Hai Teo

  3. School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    En Xie & Yuan Li

Authors
  1. Chuan-Hoo Tan
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  2. Hock-Hai Teo
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  3. En Xie
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  4. Yuan Li
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Correspondence to En Xie.

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Tan, CH., Teo, HH., Xie, E. et al. Designing sniping agents. Ann Oper Res 168, 291–305 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-008-0366-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-008-0366-6

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