Experiments on Deliberation Equilibria in Auctions

Auctions are useful mechanisms for allocating items (goods, tasks, resources, etc.) in multiagent systems. The bulk of auction theory assumes that the bidders know their own valuations for items a priori. However, in many applications the bidders need to expend significant effort (computational or information gathering) to determine their valuations. This leads to the possibility of complex strategic behavior as agents may have incentive to not only use resources to determine their own valuations, but may also attempt to determine the valuations of competing bidders. It has been shown that given any commonly used auction protocol, it is theoretically possible to construct special instances such that this strategic deliberation occurs. We study the prevalence of strategic deliberating in order to determine whether it is merely of theoretical interest or if it is an issue which arises in practice. Using anytime algorithms and performance-profile-tree-based deliberation control in diff...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Kate Larson, Tuomas Sandholm
• Keywords: ATAL 2004, Deliberation Equilibrium Solution, Performance-profile-tree-based Deliberation Control, Strategic Deliberation