Abstract
This paper analyzes the entrants to the 2007 tac Market Design Game. We present a classification of the entries to the competition, and use this classification to compare these entries. The paper also attempts to relate market dynamics to the auction rules adopted by these entries and their adaptive strategies via a set of post-tournament experiments. Based on this analysis, the paper speculates about the design of effective auction mechanisms, both in the setting of this competition and in the more general case.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Axelrod R. (2006) The evolution of cooperation. Basic Books, Persus Books Group, New York
Cason, T. N., & Friedman, D. (2008). A comparison of market institutions. In C. Plott & V. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of experimental economics results (Vol. 1), Chap. 33, North Holland.
Clearwater, S. H. (Ed.). (1996). Market-based control: A paradigm for distributed resource allocation. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific.
Cliff D. (2001) Evolution of market mechanism through a continuous space of auction-types. Technical report. Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, Bristol
Cliff D., Bruten J. (1997) Minimal-intelligence agents for bargaining behaviours in market-based environments. Technical report. Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, Bristol
Das, R., Hanson, J. E., Kephart, J. O., & Tesauro, G. (2001). Agent-human interactions in the continuous double auction. In Proceedings of the seventeenth international joint conference on artificial intelligence. Seattle, USA.
Erev I., Roth A. E. (1998) Predicting how people play games: Reinforcement learning in experimental games with unique, mixed strategy equilibria. The American Economic Review 88(4): 848–881
Friedman, D. (1993). The double auction institution: A survey. In [10], Chap. 1, (pp. 3–25).
Friedman, D., & Rich C. (2008). The matching market institution. In Handbook of experimental economics results (Vol. 1), Chap. 13, North Holland.
Friedman, D., & Rust, J. (Eds.). (1993). The double auction market: Institutions, theories and evidence. Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, Perseus Books Group.
Fudenberg D., Levine D. K. (1998) The theory of learning in games. MIT, Cambridge, MA
Gerding, E., McBurney, P., Niu, J., Parsons, S., & Phelps, S. (2007). Overview of CAT: A market design competition, version 1.1, Technical Report ULCS-07-006. Liverpool, UK: Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool.
Gjerstad S., Dickhaut J. (1998) Price formation in double auctions. Games and Economic Behavior 22: 1–29
Gode D. K., Sunder S. (1993) Allocative efficiency of markets with zero-intelligence traders: Market as a partial substitute for individual rationality. Journal of Political Economy 101(1): 119–137
He M., Jennings N. R., Leung H. F. (2003) On agent-mediated electronic commerce. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 15(4): 985–1003
Jordan, P. R., & Wellman, M. P. (2007). Best-first search for approximate equilibria in empirical games. In Proceedings of AAAI-07 workshop on trading agent design and analysis (TADA-07). Canada: Vancouver.
Jordan, P. R., Kiekintveld, C., & Wellman, M. P. (2007). Empirical game-theoretic analysis of the TAC supply chain game. In Proceedings of the sixth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 1188–1195). Hawaii: Honolulu.
Kaisers, M., Tuyls, K., Thuijsman, F., & Parsons, S. (2008). Auction analysis by normal form game approximation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on intelligent agent technology. Sydney, Australia, short paper.
Klemperer P. (2002) How (not) to run auctions: The European 3G telecom auctions. European Economic Review 46(4–5): 829–845
MacKie-Mason, J. K., & Wellman, M. P. (2006). Automated markets and trading agents. In L. Tesfatsion & K. L. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of computational economics (Vol. 2, pp. 1381–1431), Amsterdam: Elsevier, Chap. 28.
McCabe, K. A., Rassenti, S. J., & Smith, V. L. (1993). Designing a uniform price double auction. In [10], Chap. 11, (pp. 307–332).
Niu, J., Cai, K., Parsons, S., & Sklar, E. (2006). Reducing price fluctuation in continuous double auctions through pricing policy and shout improvement rule. In Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 1143–1150). Japan: Hakodate.
Niu, J., Cai, K., Parsons, S., & Sklar, E. (2007) Some preliminary results on competition between markets for automated traders. In Proceedings of AAAI-07 workshop on trading agent design and analysis (TADA-07). Canada: Vancouver.
Niu J., Mmoloke A., McBurney P., Parsons S. (2007) CATP specification: A communication protocol for CAT games. Technical report. Department of Computer Science Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York
Niu, J., Cai, K., McBurney, P., & Parsons, S. (2008) An analysis of entries in the first TAC market design competition. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on intelligent agent technology. Sydney, Australia.
Niu, J., Cai, K., Parsons, S., Gerding, E., & McBurney, P. (2008). Characterizing effective auction mechanisms: Insights from the 2007 TAC mechanism design competition. In P. Padgham & P. Müller (Eds.). Proceedings of the seventh international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 1079–1086). Portugal: Estoril.
Niu, J., Cai, K., Parsons, S., Gerding, E., McBurney, P., & Moyaux, T., et al. (2008). JCAT: A platform for the TAC market design competition. In P. Padgham, & P. Müller (Eds.), Proceedings of the seventh international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, demo paper (pp. 1649–1650). Portugal: Estoril.
Pardoe D., Stone P. (2005) Developing adaptive auction mechanisms. ACM SIGecom Exchanges 5(3): 1–10
Petric, A., Podobnik, V., Grguric, A., & Zemljic, M. (2008). Designing an effective e-market: An overview of the CAT agent. In Proceedings of AAAI-08 workshop on trading agent design and analysis (TADA-08) Chicago, IL, USA.
Phelps, S. (2005). JASA—Java auction simulation API. http://jasa.sourceforget.net/.
Phelps, S., McBurney, P., Parsons, S., & Sklar, E. (2002). Co-evolutionary auction mechanism design: A preliminary report. In Proceedings of the workshop on agent mediated electronic commerce IV (AMEC IV).
Phelps, S., Parsons, S., Sklar, E., & McBurney, P. (2003). Using genetic programming to optimise pricing rules for a double auction market. In Proceedings of the workshop on agents for electronic commerce. Pittsburgh, PA.
Phelps, S., Marcinkiewicz, M., Parsons, S., & McBurney, P. (2005). Using population-based search and evolutionary game theory to acquire better-response strategies for the double-auction market. In Proceedings of IJCAI-05 workshop on trading agent design and analysis (TADA-05).
Phelps, S., Marcinkiewicz, M., Parsons, S., & McBurney, P. (2006). A novel method for automatic strategy acquisition in n-player non-zero-sum games. In Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS’06) (pp. 705–712). New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/1160633.1160760.
Plott C. R., Smith V. L. (1978) An experimental examination of two exchange institutions. The Review of Economic Studies 45(1): 133–153
Rust, J., Miller, J. H., & Palmer, R. G. (1993). Behaviour of trading automata in a computerized double auction market. In [10], Chap. 6, (pp. 155–199).
Schwartz, R. A., Byrne, J. A., & Colaninno, A. (Eds.). (2007). The New NASDAQ Marketplace. Zicklin School of Business Financial Markets Series. New York: Springer.
Shah, A. (1997). Competing exchanges: The international dimension. http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/MEDIA/1997/cmarkets.html.
Smith V. L. (1962) An experimental study of competitive market behaviour. Journal of Political Economy 70(2): 111–137
Sodomka, E., Collins, J., & Gini, M. L. (2007). Efficient statistical methods for evaluating trading agent performance. In Proceedings of the 27th conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 770–775). Canada: Vancouver.
Stone P., Greenwald A. (2005) The first international trading agent competition: Autonomous bidding agents. Electronic Commerce Research 5(2): 229–265. doi:10.1007/s10660-005-6158-z
Sutton R. S., Barto A. G. (1998) Reinforcement learning: An introduction. MIT, Cambridge, MA
Vytelingum, P., Vetsikas, I. A., Shi, B., & Jennings, N. R. (2008). IAMwildCAT: The winning strategy for the TAC market design competition. In Proceedings of 18th European conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 428–434). Patras, Greece.
Walsh, W., Das, R., Tesauro, G., & Kephart, J. O. (2002). Analyzing complex strategic interactions in multi-agent systems. In P. Gmytrasiewicz & S. Parsons (Eds.), Proceedings of 2002 workshop on game-theoretic and decision-theoretic agents (GTDT-02). AAAI, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Walsh, W. E., Parkes, D. C., & Das R. (2003). Choosing samples to compute heuristic-strategy Nash equilibrium. In AAMAS 2003 workshop on agent mediated electronic commerce. Melbourne, Australia.
Wellman M. P., Cheng S. F., Reeves D. M., Lochner K. M. (2003) Trading agents competing: Performance, progress, and market effectiveness. IEEE Intelligent Systems 18(6): 48–53
Widrow, B., & Hoff, M. E. (1960). Adaptive switching circuits. In 1960 IRE western electric show and convention record (pp. 96–104).
Wurman P.R., Walsh W.E., Wellman M.P. (1998) Flexible double auctions for electronic commerce: Theory and implementation. Decision Support Systems 24(1): 17–27
Wurman P. R., Wellman M. P., Walsh W. E. (2001) A parametrization of the auction design space. Games and Economic Behavior 35: 304–338
Zhan W., Friedman D. (2007) Markups in double auction markets. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 31(9): 2984–3005
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Niu, J., Cai, K., Parsons, S. et al. What the 2007 TAC Market Design Game tells us about effective auction mechanisms. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 21, 172–203 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-009-9110-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-009-9110-0