10,315 research outputs found
Market-based Recommendation: Agents that Compete for Consumer Attention
The amount of attention space available for recommending suppliers to consumers on e-commerce sites is typically limited. We present a competitive distributed recommendation mechanism based on adaptive software agents for efficiently allocating the 'consumer attention space', or banners. In the example of an electronic shopping mall, the task is delegated to the individual shops, each of which evaluates the information that is available about the consumer and his or her interests (e.g. keywords, product queries, and available parts of a profile). Shops make a monetary bid in an auction where a limited amount of 'consumer attention space' for the arriving consumer is sold. Each shop is represented by a software agent that bids for each consumer. This allows shops to rapidly adapt their bidding strategy to focus on consumers interested in their offerings. For various basic and simple models for on-line consumers, shops, and profiles, we demonstrate the feasibility of our system by evolutionary simulations as in the field of agent-based computational economics (ACE). We also develop adaptive software agents that learn bidding strategies, based on neural networks and strategy exploration heuristics. Furthermore, we address the commercial and technological advantages of this distributed market-based approach. The mechanism we describe is not limited to the example of the electronic shopping mall, but can easily be extended to other domains
Moving from Data-Constrained to Data-Enabled Research: Experiences and Challenges in Collecting, Validating and Analyzing Large-Scale e-Commerce Data
Widespread e-commerce activity on the Internet has led to new opportunities
to collect vast amounts of micro-level market and nonmarket data. In this paper
we share our experiences in collecting, validating, storing and analyzing large
Internet-based data sets in the area of online auctions, music file sharing and
online retailer pricing. We demonstrate how such data can advance knowledge by
facilitating sharper and more extensive tests of existing theories and by
offering observational underpinnings for the development of new theories. Just
as experimental economics pushed the frontiers of economic thought by enabling
the testing of numerous theories of economic behavior in the environment of a
controlled laboratory, we believe that observing, often over extended periods
of time, real-world agents participating in market and nonmarket activity on
the Internet can lead us to develop and test a variety of new theories.
Internet data gathering is not controlled experimentation. We cannot randomly
assign participants to treatments or determine event orderings. Internet data
gathering does offer potentially large data sets with repeated observation of
individual choices and action. In addition, the automated data collection holds
promise for greatly reduced cost per observation. Our methods rely on
technological advances in automated data collection agents. Significant
challenges remain in developing appropriate sampling techniques integrating
data from heterogeneous sources in a variety of formats, constructing
generalizable processes and understanding legal constraints. Despite these
challenges, the early evidence from those who have harvested and analyzed large
amounts of e-commerce data points toward a significant leap in our ability to
understand the functioning of electronic commerce.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000231 in the
Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
A Rule-driven Approach for Defining the Behavior of Negotiating Software Agents
One problem with existing agent-mediated negotiation systems is that they rely on ad hoc, static, non-adaptive, and hardcoded schemes to represent the behaviour of agents. This limitation is probably due to the complexity of the negotiation task itself. Indeed, while negotiating, software (human) agents face tough decisions. These decisions are based not only on the information made available by the negotiation server, but on the behaviour of the other participants in the negotiation process as well. The information and the behaviour in question are constantly changing and highly uncertain. In the first part of the paper, we propose a rule-driven approach to represent, manage and explore negotiation strategies and coordination information. For that, we divide the behaviour of negotiating agents into protocols, strategies and coordination. Among the many advantages of the proposed solution, we can cite the high level of abstraction, the closeness to human understanding, the versatility, and the possibility to modify the agents' behaviour during the negotiation process. To validate our solution, we ran many agent tournaments, and used the rule-driven approach to implement bidding strategies that are common in the English and Dutch auctions. We also implemented simple coordination schemes across several auctions. The ongoing validation work is detailed and discussed in the second part of the paper. Un des inconvĂ©nients qu'on retrouve frĂ©quemment dans les systĂšmes de nĂ©gociation par agents est qu'ils reposent sur des schĂ©mas ad-hoc, non adaptatifs et figĂ©s dans le code pour reprĂ©senter le comportement des agents. Cette limitation est probablement due Ă la complexitĂ© de l'activitĂ© de nĂ©gociation elle-mĂȘme. En effet, au cours de la nĂ©gociation, les agents logiciels (humains) ont des dĂ©cisions difficiles Ă prendre. Ces dĂ©cisions ne sont pas seulement basĂ©es sur l'information disponible sur le serveur de nĂ©gociation, mais aussi sur le comportement des autres participants durant le processus de nĂ©gociation. L'information et le comportement en question changent constamment et sont trĂšs incertains. Dans la premiĂšre partie de l'article, nous proposons une approche Ă base de rĂšgles pour reprĂ©senter, gĂ©rer et explorer les stratĂ©gies de nĂ©gociation ainsi que l'information de coordination. Parmi les nombreux avantages de la solution proposĂ©e, on peut citer le haut niveau d'abstraction, la proximitĂ© avec la comprĂ©hension humaine, la souplesse d'utilisation et la possibilitĂ© de modifier le comportement des agents durant le processus de nĂ©gociation. Pour valider notre solution, nous avons effectuĂ© plusieurs tournois entre agents et utilisĂ© l'approche Ă base de rĂšgles pour implĂ©menter des stratĂ©gies simples applicables Ă l'enchĂšre anglaise et Ă l'enchĂšre hollandaise. Nous avons aussi implĂ©mentĂ© des schĂ©mas simples de coordination impliquant plusieurs enchĂšres. Le travail de validation, en cours, est dĂ©taillĂ© et discutĂ© dans la seconde partie de l'article.e-negotiation, online auction, software agent, negotiation strategy, coordination, rule-based system, rule engine, NĂ©gociation Ă©lectronique, enchĂšres en ligne, agents logiciels, stratĂ©gie de nĂ©gociation, coordination, systĂšme Ă base de rĂšgles, moteur de rĂšgles
Evolutionary stability of behavioural types in the continuous double auction
In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of different types of bidding behaviour for trading agents in the Continuous Double Auction (CDA). Specifically, we consider behavioural types that are neutral (expected profit maximising), passive (targeting a higher profit than neutral) and aggressive (trading off profit for a better chance of transacting). For these types, we employ an evolutionary game-theoretic analysis to determine the population dynamics of agents that use them in different types of environments, including dynamic ones with market shocks. From this analysis, we find that given a symmetric demand and supply, agents are most likely to adopt neutral behaviour in static environments, while there tends to be more passive than neutral agents in dynamic ones. Furthermore, when we have asymmetric demand and supply, agents invariably adopt passive behaviour in both static and dynamic environments, though the gain in so doing is considerably smaller than in the symmetric case
An Investigation Report on Auction Mechanism Design
Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information
available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take.
Since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes, they have
been widely used in solving real-world optimization problems, and in
structuring stock or futures exchanges. Auctions also provide a very valuable
testing-ground for economic theory, and they play an important role in
computer-based control systems.
Auction mechanism design aims to manipulate the rules of an auction in order
to achieve specific goals. Economists traditionally use mathematical methods,
mainly game theory, to analyze auctions and design new auction forms. However,
due to the high complexity of auctions, the mathematical models are typically
simplified to obtain results, and this makes it difficult to apply results
derived from such models to market environments in the real world. As a result,
researchers are turning to empirical approaches.
This report aims to survey the theoretical and empirical approaches to
designing auction mechanisms and trading strategies with more weights on
empirical ones, and build the foundation for further research in the field
Computational Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms
Game theory has developed powerful tools for analyzing decision making in systems with multiple autonomous actors. These tools, when tailored to computational settings, provide a foundation for building multiagent software systems. This tailoring gives rise to the field of computational mechanism design, which applies economic principles to computer systems design
Evolutionary Optimization of ZIP60: A Controlled Explosion in Hyperspace
The âZIPâ adaptive trading algorithm has been demonstrated to out-perform human traders in experimental studies of continuous double auction (CDA) markets. The original ZIP algorithm requires the values of eight control parameters to be set correctly. A new extension of the ZIP algorithm, called ZIP60, requires the values of 60 parameters to be set correctly. ZIP60 is shown here to produce significantly better results than the original ZIP (called âZIP8â hereafter), for negligable additional computational costs. A genetic algorithm (GA) is used to search the 60-dimensional ZIP60 parameter space, and it finds parameter vectors that yield ZIP60 traders with mean scores significantly better than those of ZIP8s. This paper shows that the optimizing evolutionary search works best when the GA itself controls the dimensionality of the search-space, so that the search commences in an 8-d space and thereafter the dimensionality of the search-space is gradually increased by the GA until it is exploring a 60-d space. Furthermore, the results from ZIP60 cast some doubt on prior ZIP8 results concerning the evolution of new âhybridâ auction mechanisms that appeared to be better than the CDA
Statistical properties of online auctions
We characterize the statistical properties of a large number of online
auctions run on eBay. Both stationary and dynamic properties, like
distributions of prices, number of bids etc., as well as relations between
these quantities are studied. The analysis of the data reveals surprisingly
simple distributions and relations, typically of power-law form. Based on these
findings we introduce a simple method to identify suspicious auctions that
could be influenced by a form of fraud known as shill bidding. Furthermore the
influence of bidding strategies is discussed. The results indicate that the
observed behavior is related to a mixture of agents using a variety of
strategies.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Int. J. Mod. Phys.
Explorations in Evolutionary Design of Online Auction Market Mechanisms
This paper describes the use of a genetic algorithm (GA) to find optimal parameter-values for trading agents that operate in virtual online auction âe-marketplacesâ, where the rules of those marketplaces are also under simultaneous control of the GA. The aim is to use the GA to automatically design new mechanisms for agent-based e-marketplaces that are more efficient than online markets designed by (or populated by) humans. The space of possible auction-types explored by the GA includes the Continuous Double Auction (CDA) mechanism (as used in most of the worldâs financial exchanges), and also two purely one-sided mechanisms. Surprisingly, the GA did not always settle on the CDA as an optimum. Instead, novel hybrid auction mechanisms were evolved, which are unlike any existing market mechanisms. In this paper we show that, when the market supply and demand schedules undergo sudden âshockâ changes partway through the evaluation process, two-sided hybrid market mechanisms can evolve which may be unlike any human-designed auction and yet may also be significantly more efficient than any human designed market mechanism
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