Designing a Successful Trading Agent: A Fuzzy Set Approach

Abstract

Abstract-Software agents are increasingly being used to represent humans in online auctions. Such agents have the advantages of being able to systematically monitor a wide variety of auctions and then make rapid decisions about what bids to place in what auctions. They can do this continuously and repetitively without losing concentration. To provide a means of evaluating and comparing (benchmarking) research methods in this area the trading agent competition (TAC) was established. This competition involves a number of agents bidding against one another in a number of related auctions (operating different protocols) to purchase travel packages for customers. Against this background, this paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of SouthamptonTAC, one of the most successful participants in both the Second and the Third International Competitions. Our agent uses fuzzy techniques at the heart of its decision making: to make bidding decisions in the face of uncertainty, to make predictions about the likely outcomes of auctions, and to alter the agent's bidding strategy in response to the prevailing market conditions.

Autonomous Adaptive Agents for Single Seller Sealed Bid Auctions

“…We will also consider alternative auction structures such as English auctions under models other than the PVM. Recently there have been many architectures proposed for CDA that take into account the timing of bids (see, for example [19,45]). These methods could be used as a basis for designing agents for single seller auctions that attempt to model competitors' strategies.…”

“…For example, ZI-C agents for CDA is non-adaptive, as is the SouthamptonTAC agent used for the 2001 TAC [18]. In contrast, the SouthamptonTAC agent for the 2002 TAC is adaptive [19]. Several non-adaptive strategies have been proposed for CDA, principally for benchmarking adaptive algorithms (see, for example, [21,33]).…”

“…GD has been further extended by Tesauro and Bredin [45] to include a mechanism to optimise long term profits using a forward estimate of the profitability of bid success and a dynamic programming formulation of the value function. He et al [20] and He and Jennings [19] present a fuzzy logic approach towards history based agents. The Fuzzy Logic (FL) agents form fuzzy rules based on the current ask and bid and the median price of the auctions stored in the history.…”

A fuzzy logic based method to acquire user threshold of minimum-support for mining association rules

“…The fuzzy logic control method can be applied in not only control problems but also other problems (e.g., automated auctions in e-commerce [8][9][10]). In this paper, we present a new application in the domain of data mining.…”

An adaptive type-2 fuzzy based charging technique for market design agents in uncertain environments

“…Yet fuzzy set approaches were shown to be very effective when used to formulate strategies for automated traders in double auction markets [10], in the travel-agent classic scenario TAC game [11], [12], and in the TAC Supply Chain Management (SCM) game [13].…”