Self-Confirming Price Prediction for Bidding in Simultaneous Ascending Auctions
(Download full paper)Filed under research category: Online market design
Tagged as: market-based_scheduling auctions bidding_strategies empirical_game_analysis online_markets market_design incentive-centered_design
Authors
Anna Osepayshvili, Michael P. Wellman, Daniel M. Reeves, and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason
Publication date
July, 2005
Abstract
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this problem. We present a new family of decisiontheoretic bidding strategies that use probabilistic predictions of final prices. We focus on selfconfirming price distribution predictions, which by definition turn out to be correct when all agents bid decision-theoretically based on them. Bidding based on these is provably not optimal in general, but our experimental evidence indicates the strategy can be quite effective compared to other known methods.
Citation
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2005), (July 2005).