Bidding Strategies in Agent-Based Continuous Double Auctions [Paperback]

This book provides a new bidding strategy for agents to adopt in continuous double auctions (CDAs) and proposes some generally used tools to enhance the performance of existing bidding strategies in CDAs. It is the first book to focus on CDAs where a limited amount of seller agents and buyer agents trade what they want. The superior performance of the new bidding strategy and the tools proposed by this book are illustrated through extensive experiments.

Online auctions are a platform to trade goods on the Internet. In this context, negotiation capabilities for software agents in continuous double auctions (CDAs) are a central concern. Agents need to be able to prepare bids for and evaluate offers on behalf of the users they represent with the aim of obtaining the maximum benefit for their users.

For the agents, their bids are decided according to some bidding strategy. However, in CDAs, it is a complex decision problem because of the inherent uncertainty and dynamics of the auction market. In this book, we present a new bidding strategy for agents to adopt in CDAs and propose tools to enhance the performance of existing bidding strategies in CDAs. The superior performance of the new bidding strategy as well as the tools presented in this book are illustrated through extensive experiments.

1 Introduction.- 1.1 Agent-Based Auctions in Electronic Commerce.- 1.2 Research Aims.- 1.3 Research Contributions.- 1.4 Book Structure.- 2 Agent-Based CDAs and Bidding Strategies.- 2.1 Agent-Based Continuous Double Auctions.- 2.2 Continuous Double Auction Mechanisms.- 2.3 Bidding Strategies for Agents in CDAs.- 2.4 Evaluation Criteria of Bidding Strategies.- 2.5 Approaches for Analyzing Bidding Strategies.- 3 The Adaptive Attitude Bidding Strategy.- 3.1 Eagerness.- 3.2 Bidding Strategies Based on Eagerness.- 3.3 Experimental Analysis.- 3.4 Summary.- 4 Soft Asks and Soft Bids.- 4.1 Motivation.- 4.2 Definitions.- 4.3 Experimental lST