Abstract
A key step in the evaluation of an intelligent agent (either autonomous or human) is determining the agent’s success as compared to other agents designed to participate in the same environment. Such comparisons are the basis for the Trading Agent Competition (TAC), in which autonomous trading agents compete in simulated market scenarios. TAC servers and agents alike are highly specialized, and typically require teams of developers as TAC simulations tend to be rather complex. In this work, we present a client-server infrastructure that is capable of simulating not just one complex market and its corresponding set of agents, but a wide space of markets and potentially more robust agents. Supported market mechanisms include both user-designed auctions and a configurable set of auctions whose basic building blocks are commonly-studied (e.g., first-price, second-price, simultaneous, sequential auctions). Our so-called Java Auction Configuration Kit (JACK) is intended to facilitate research on the interplay between a variety of auction mechanisms and a variety of agent strategies (both autonomous and human) by simplifying the orchestration of auction simulation.
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Goff, T., Greenwald, A., Hilliard, E., Ketter, W., Loomis, A., Sodomka, E. (2013). JACK: A Java Auction Configuration Kit. In: David, E., Kiekintveld, C., Robu, V., Shehory, O., Stein, S. (eds) Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Designing Trading Strategies and Mechanisms for Electronic Markets. AMEC TADA 2012 2012. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 136. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40864-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40864-9_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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