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

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. Categories and Subje...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Ioannis A. Vetsikas, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: ATAL 2008, Bidding Strategies, Intelligent Agents, Multi-unit Sealed-bid Auctions, Sealed-bid Auctions