Bidding Strategies for 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. In this paper, we extend this analysis to the multi-unit case, and also analyze the multi-unit sealed-bid auctions in which a combination of these issues are present. This analysis constitutes the main contribution of this paper. We then demonstrate the usefulness in practice of this analysis; we show in simulations that taking into account all these issues allows the bidders to maximize their utility. Furthermore, using this analysis allo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Ioannis A. Vetsikas, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: AAAI 2008, Intelligent Agents, Real World Auctions, Reserve Price, Sealed-bid Auctions