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ATTac-2001: A Learning, Autonomous Bidding Agent

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Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce IV. Designing Mechanisms and Systems (AMEC 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2531))

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Abstract

Auctions are becoming an increasingly popular method for transacting business, especially over the Internet. This paper presents a general approach to building autonomous bidding agents to bid in multiple simultaneous auctions for interacting goods. The core of our approach is learning a model of the empirical price dynamics based on past data and using the model to analytically calculate, to the greatest extent possible, optimal bids. This approach is fully implemented as ATTac-2001, a top-scoring agent in the second Trading Agent Competition (TAC-01). ATTac-2001 uses boosting techniques to learn conditional distributions of auction clearing prices. We present experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of this predictor relative to several reasonable alternatives.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, 78712-1188, Austin, Texas, USA

    Peter Stone

  2. AT&T Labs — Research, 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, 07932, NJ, USA

    Robert E. Schapire & János A. Csirik

  3. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, 08854-8019, NJ, USA

    Michael L. Littman

  4. Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago, 5734 S. Ellis Ave, IL 60637, Chicago, USA

    David McAllester

Authors
  1. Peter Stone
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  2. Robert E. Schapire
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  3. János A. Csirik
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  4. Michael L. Littman
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  5. David McAllester
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Julian Padget

  2. IBM - Haifa Research Labs, Haifa University, Israel

    Onn Shehory

  3. Maxwell Dworkin Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA

    David Parkes

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Norman Sadeh

  5. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Harthorne, NY, USA

    William E. Walsh

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Stone, P., Schapire, R.E., Csirik, J.A., Littman, M.L., McAllester, D. (2002). ATTac-2001: A Learning, Autonomous Bidding Agent. In: Padget, J., Shehory, O., Parkes, D., Sadeh, N., Walsh, W.E. (eds) Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce IV. Designing Mechanisms and Systems. AMEC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2531. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36378-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36378-5_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00327-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36378-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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