Towards agents participating in realistic multi-unit sealed-bid auctions

  • Authors:
  • loannis A. Vetsikas;Nicholas R. Jennings

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Southampton, Southampton, UK;University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

When autonomous agents decide on their bidding strategies in real world auctions, they have a number of concerns that go beyond the models that are normally analyzed in traditional auction theory. Oftentimes, the agents have budget constraints and the auctions have a reserve price, both of which restrict the bids the agents can place. In addition, their attitude need not be risk-neutral and they may have uncertainty about the value of the goods they are buying. Some of these issues have been examined individually for single-unit sealed-bid auctions. However, here, we work towards extending this analysis to the multi-unit case, and also analyzing the multi-unit sealed-bid auctions in which a combination of these issues are present. In this paper, we present the initial results of this work. More specifically, we present the equilibria that exist in multi-unit sealed-bid auctions, when either the agents can have any risk attitude, or the auction has a reserve price.