Abstract. As software agents are well-suited for complex, dynamic and constrained environments that electronic markets are, research into automated trading and negotiation has been flourishing. However, developing electronic marketplaces and trading strategies without careful design and experimentation can be costly and carries high risks. This chapter discusses the need for tools to support the design and implementation of electronic market simulations or games to emulate real life complex situations of strategic interdependence among multiple agents. Such games can be used to conduct research on market infrastructure, negotiation protocols and strategic behaviour. After a brief introduction into the field of agents, we present an overview of agent negotiation in general, and auction protocols in particular, which are among the most popular negotiation protocols. We then present the e-Game platform which has been developed to support the design, implementation and execution of market simulation games involving auctions. How the development of market games is facilitated is demonstrated with an example game.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Agorics. Auctions. http://www.agorics.com/Library/auctions.html.
Arthur, W.B., Holland, J., LeBaron, B., Palmer, R. and Tayler, P. Asset pricing under endogenous expectations in an artificial stock market. In Arthur, W. B., Durlauf, S. and Lane, D., editors, The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II, Addison-Wesley Longman, Reading, MA, pages 15-44, 1997.
Bakos, Y. The emerging role of electronic marketplaces on the internet. Communications of the ACM, 41(8):35-42, 1998.
Bichler, M. A roadmap to auction-based negotiation protocols for electronic commerce. In Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS- 33),2000.
Bichler, M. and Kalagnanam, J. Configurable offers and winner determina- tion in multi-attribute auctions. European Journal of Operational Research, 160 (2):380-394, 2005.
Chavez, A. and Maes, P. Kasbah: An agent marketplace for buying and sell- ing goods. In First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM’96), pages 75-90, 1996.
Dash, R. K. and Jennings, N. R. and Parkes, D. C. Computational-mechanism design: A call to arms. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18(6):40-47, 2003.
de Vries, S. and Vohra, R. Combinatorial auctions: A survey. INFORMS Journal on Computing, 15(3):284-309, 2003.
Ebay. http://www.ebay.com/.
Fasli, M. Agent Technology for e-Commerce. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 2007.
Fasli, M. On Agent Technology for E-commerce: Trust Security and Legal Issues. Knowledge Engineering Review (in press), 2007.
Fasli, M. and Michalakopoulos, M. e-Game: A generic auction platform sup- porting customizable market games. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM Intelligent Agent Technology Conference (IAT 2004), pages 190-196, Beijing, China, 2004.
FIPA Communicative Act Library Specification. http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00037/, 2002.
Griss, M. and Letsinger, R. Games at work-agent-mediated e-commerce simula- tion. In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Autonomous agents (Agents 00), Barcelona, Spain, 2000.
JASA: Java Auction Simulator API. http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~sphelps/jasa/.
Klemperer, P. How (not) to run auctions: The European 3G Telecom Auctions. European Economic Review, 46(4-5):829-845, 2002.
Kumar, M. and Feldman, S. Internet auctions. In Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce, pages 49-60, 1998.
LeBaron, B., Arthur, W. B. and Palmer, R. Time series properties of an artifi- cial stock market. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 23:(1487-1516), 1999.
Lochner, K. M. and Wellman, M. P. Rule-based specifications of auction mech- anisms. In Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems Conference (AAMAS), pages 818-825, 2004.
Maes, P., Guttman, R., and Moukas, A. Agents that buy and sell: Transforming commerce as we know it. Communications of the ACM, 42(3):81-91, 1999.
Mas-Colell, A., Whinston, M. D., and Green, J. R. Microeconomic Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995.
Neumann, D. and Weinhardt, C. Domain-independent enegotiation design: Prospects, methods, and challenges. In 13th International Workshop on Data- base and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA’02), pages 680-686, 2002.
Nisan, N. Algorithms for selfish agents. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, (STACS’99), LNCS Volume 1563, pages 1-15. Springer, Berlin, 1999.
Nisan, N. Bidding and allocation in combinatorial auctions. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC-00), pages 1-12, Minneapolis, MN, 2000.
Nisan, N. and Ronen, A. Algorithmic mechanism design. Games and Economic Behavior, 35:166-196, 2001.
onSale. http://www.onsale.com/, 2005.
Parkes, D. C. Iterative Combinatorial Auctions: Achieving Economic and Com- putational Efficiency. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2001.
Pekec, A. and Rothkopf, M. H. Combinatorial auction design. Management Science, 49(11):1485-1503, 2003.
Sandholm, T. Distributed rational decision making. In G. Weiss, editor, Multi- agent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, pages 201-258. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
Sun, J. and Sadeh, N. M. Coordinating multi-attribute procurement auctions subject to finite capacity considerations. Technical Report CMU-ISRI-03-105, e-Supply Chain Management Laboratory, Institute for Software Research International, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2004.
Trading Agent Competition. http://www.sics.se/tac/.
Tsvetovatyy, M., Gini, M., Mobasher, B., and Wieckowski, Z. Magma: An agent- based virtual market for electronic commerce. Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence, 6, 1997.
Wurman, P., Walsh, W. E., and Wellman, M. P. Flexible double auctions for electronic commerce: theory and implementation. Decision Support Systems, 24:17-27, 1998.
Wurman, P., Wellman, M. P., and Walsh, W. The Michigan Internet Auction- Bot: A configurable auction server for human and software agents. In Proceed- ings of the Autonomous Agents Conference, pages 301-308, 1998.
Wurman, P. R., Wellman, M. P., and Walsh, W. E. A parameterization of the auction design space. Games and Economic Behavior, 35(1):304-338, 2001.
Zou, Y., Finin, T., Ding, L., Chen, H., and Pan R. TAGA: Trading agent compe- tition in Agentcities. In Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis held in conjunction with the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2003.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fasli, M., Michalakopoulos, M. (2007). Designing and Developing Electronic Market Games. In: Baba, N., Jain, L.C., Handa, H. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Paradigms in Computer Games. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 71. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72705-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72705-7_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-72704-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-72705-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)