Skip to main content

A Long-Term Profit Seeking Strategy for Continuous Double Auctions in a Trading Agent Competition

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3955))

Abstract

This paper presents a new bidding strategy for continuous double auctions (CDA) designed for Mertacor, a successful trading agent, which won the first price in the “travel game” of Trading Agent Competition (TAC) for 2005. TAC provides a realistic benchmarking environment in which various travel commodities are offered in simultaneous online auctions. Among these, entertainment tickets are traded in CDA. The latter, represent the most dynamic part of the TAC game, in which agents are both sellers and buyers. In a CDA many uncertainty factors are introduced, because prices are constantly changing during the game and price fluctuations are hard to be predicted. In order to deal with these factors of uncertainty we have designed a strategy based on achieving a pre-defined long-term profit. This preserves the bidding attitude of our agent and shows flexibility in changes of the environment. We finally present and discuss the results of TAC-05, as well as an analysis of agents performance in the entertainment auctions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Cheng, S.-F., Leung, E., Lochner, K.M., O’Malley, K., Reeves, D.M., Schvartzman, L.J., Wellman, M.P.: Walverine: A walrasian trading agent. In: Proceedings of the Second international Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 465–472. ACM Press, New York (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Friedman, D., Rust, J.: The Double Auction Market: Institutions, Theories and Evidence. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Greenwald, A., Boyan, J.: Bidding Under Uncertainty: Theory and Experiments. In: Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 209–216 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  4. He, M., Jennings, N.R.: Designing a Successful Trading Agent: A Fuzzy Set Approach. IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems 12(3), 389–410 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Kagel, J.H., Vogt, W.: Buyer’s bid double auctions; Preliminary Experimental Results. In: Friedman, D., Rust, J. (eds.) The Double Auction Market: Institutions, Theories, and Evidence, pp. 285–305. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Kolman, B., Beck, R.: Elementary Linear Programmig with Applications. Academic Press Inc., London (1995)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Sardinha, J.A.R.P., Milidiú, R.L., Paranhos, P.M., Cunha, P.M., Lucena, C.J.P.: An Agent Based Architecture for Highly Competitive Electronic Markets. In: Proceedings of the 18th International FLAIRS Conference, Clearwater Beach, Florida, USA, May 16-18 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Stone, P., Schapire, R., Littman, M., Csirik, J., McAllester, D.: Decision-theoretic bidding based on learned density models in simultaneous, interacting auctions. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 19, 209–242 (2003)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Vetsikas, I.A., Selman, B.A.: Principled study of the design tradeoffs for autonomous trading agents. In: Proceedings of the Second international Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 473–480. ACM Press, New York (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Wellman, M.P., Wurman, P.R., Oapos, M.K., Bangera, R., Lin, S.-D., Reeves, D., Walsh, W.E.: Designing the market game for a trading agent competition. IEEE Internet Computing 5(2), 43–51 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Kehagias, D., Toulis, P., Mitkas, P. (2006). A Long-Term Profit Seeking Strategy for Continuous Double Auctions in a Trading Agent Competition. In: Antoniou, G., Potamias, G., Spyropoulos, C., Plexousakis, D. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. SETN 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3955. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11752912_14

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11752912_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34117-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34118-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics