Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Designing Trading Strategies and Mechanisms for Electronic Markets: AAMAS Workshop, AMEC 2009, Budapest, Hungary, May 12, 2009, and IJCAI Workshop, TADA 2009, Pasadena, CA, USA, July 13, 2009, Selected and Revised Paper

284 Pages·2010·6.618 MB·English

by  Sofia Ceppi, Nicola Gatti (auth.), Esther David, Enrico Gerding, David Sarne, Onn Shehory (eds.)

Lecture Notes
in Business Information Processing 59
SeriesEditors
WilvanderAalst
EindhovenTechnicalUniversity,TheNetherlands
JohnMylopoulos
UniversityofTrento,Italy
MichaelRosemann
QueenslandUniversityofTechnology,Brisbane,Qld,Australia
MichaelJ.Shaw
UniversityofIllinois,Urbana-Champaign,IL,USA
ClemensSzyperski
MicrosoftResearch,Redmond,WA,USA
Esther David Enrico Gerding
David Sarne Onn Shehory (Eds.)
Agent-Mediated
Electronic Commerce
Designing Trading Strategies
and Mechanisms for Electronic Markets
AAMAS Workshop,AMEC 2009
Budapest, Hungary, May 12, 2009, and
IJCAI Workshop, TADA 2009
Pasadena, CA, USA, July 13, 2009
Selected and Revised Papers
1 3
VolumeEditors
EstherDavid
AshkelonAcademicCollege
Ashkelon,78461,Israel
E-mail:[email protected]
EnricoGerding
UniversityofSouthampton
Southampton,SO171BJ,UK
E-mail:[email protected]
DavidSarne
BarIlanUniversity
Ramat-Gan,52900,Israel
E-mail:[email protected]
OnnShehory
IBMHaifaResearchLab
MountCarmel,Haifa,31905,Israel
E-mail:[email protected]
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2010933125
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Preface
The past decade in e-commerce will be remembered as one in which agent-
mediated electronic commerce technology became a reality. The evolution from
electronic data interchange technology to electronic marketplaces brought
e-commerce to the masses. Yet it was accompanied by numerous challenges at-
tributedtotheexponentialincreaseintheeffortsrequiredforsearchingandpro-
cessing information as well as coordinating with the different parties involved.
Theintroductionofautonomousagentsine-commerce,enablingagent-mediated
trading, holds the promise of bridging this gap, by facilitating flexible, faster,
lesslabor-intensiveandhighlycompetitivecommerce.Usingagents,e-commerce
nowgoesbeyondmerelyeliminatingthemediatorsinthetraditionalprocessand
offersadynamicsetoftechnologies,integratedapplicationsandmulti-enterprise
business processes that link enterprises together. Consequently, the focus of re-
search in the area of e-commerce is now on technologies for online advertising,
searching, negotiating, ordering, delivering, paying, using, and servicing. Nowa-
days, the application of agents in e-commerce is well recognized as one of the
fastest-growing and most exciting areas of computer science.
This volume presents some of the recent advances in research on designing
trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated electronic commerce. It is
built around a collection of articles initially presented at two highly respected
international workshops held in the summer of 2009. The first is the 11th In-
ternational Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2009)
collocated with the AAMAS 2009 conference held in Budapest, Hungary. The
second is the 2009 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA
2009) collocated with the IJCAI 2009 conference held in Pasadena, California,
USA. The primary goalof both workshops is to bring together novel work from
diverse fields that focus on the modeling, implementation, and evaluation of
computational trading agent strategies and market mechanisms. Research pre-
sented at these workshops traditionally addresses a mix of both theoretical and
practicalissuesrelatingtothedevelopmentofagentsforsupportinge-commerce
both at the agent and system level. Focus is placed mostly on individual be-
haviors, interaction, computational aspects, collective behavior and mechanism
designandempiricalevaluation,allinthecontextoftrade.Solutionandanalysis
methodology in these works commonly stems from various different techniques
foundincomputerscience,operationsresearch,artificialintelligence,distributed
systems and economics, including game theory.
We hope that, with the growing interest in the design of intelligent trading
agents,mechanisms and systems, this book will be both a useful resourceand a
source for inspiration for researchers,students and practitioners working in this
fascinating area.We would like to thank the members of the ProgramCommit-
tees of the AMEC and TADA workshops for their high-quality reviews which
VI Preface
enabled this selection of papers. Thanks also go to the authors for submitting
theirrevisedpaperstothe volumeandparticipantsinthe workshopsforfruitful
discussions which helped strengthen the papers further in their revised form.
March 2010 Esther David
Enrico Gerding
David Sarne
Onn Shehory
Organization
AMEC Workshop Organizers
Esther David Ashkelon Academic College, Israel
David Sarne Bar Ilan University, Israel
Onn Shehory IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel
TADA Workshop Organizer
Enrico Gerding University of Southampton, UK
Program Committee (AMEC+TADA)
Michael Benisch Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Ken Brown University College Cork, Ireland
John Collins University of Minnesota, USA
Vincent Conitzer Duke University, USA
Ulle Endriss University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Maria Fasli Essex University, UK
Shaheen Fatima LoughboroughUniversity, UK
Enrico Gerding University of Southampton, UK
Maria Gini University of Minnesota, USA
Amy Greenwald Brown University, USA
Minghua He Aston University, UK
Takayuki Ito Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
Sverker Janson Swedish Institute of Computer Science,
Sweden
Patrick Jordan University of Michigan, USA
Wolfgang Ketter RSM Erasmus University, The Netherlands
Sven Koenig University of Southern California, USA
Kate Larson University of Waterloo, Canada
Peter McBurney University of Liverpool, UK
Tomasz Michalak University of Liverpool, UK
Tracy Mullen Penn State University, USA
Jinzhong Niu Brooklyn College, City University of
New York, USA
Benno Overeinder Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
David Pardoe University of Texas at Austin, USA
Simon Parsons Brooklyn College, City University of
New York, USA
VIII Organization
Steve Phelps University of Essex, UK
Ariel Procaccia Microsoft Israel R&D Center, Israel
Juan Antonio
Rodriguez Aguilar IIIA-CSIC, Catalonia, Spain
Alex Rogers University of Southampton, UK
Jeffrey Rosenschein Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Norman Sadeh Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Alberto Sardinha Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Ioannis A. Vetsikas University of Southampton, UK
Perukrishnen Vytelingum University of Southampton, UK
William Walsh CombineNet, USA
Michael Wellman University of Michigan, USA
Steven Willmott 3scale Networks, Spain
Dongmo Zhang University of Western Sydney, Australia
Haizheng Zhang Microsoft, USA
Table of Contents
A Study of Central Auction Based Wholesale Electricity Markets ...... 1
Sofia Ceppi and Nicola Gatti
The Choice of Eliminating the Uncertainty Cloud in Auctions ......... 15
Esther David and David Sarne
Eliciting Expert Advice in Service-Oriented Computing............... 29
Enrico H. Gerding, Kate Larson, and Nicholas R. Jennings
Approximating the Qualitative Vickrey Auction by a Negotiation
Protocol ........................................................ 44
Koen V. Hindriks, Dmytro Tykhonov, and Mathijs de Weerdt
Automated Analysis of Auction Traces ............................. 58
Mark Hoogendoorn and Maria Gini
MechanismDesignfortheOnlineAllocationofItemswithoutMonetary
Payments ....................................................... 74
Behnam Jalilzadeh, L´eon Planken, and Mathijs de Weerdt
ADemand-DrivenApproachforaMulti-AgentSysteminSupplyChain
Management .................................................... 88
Yevgeniya Kovalchuk and Maria Fasli
Mechanism Design for Eliciting Probabilistic Estimates from Multiple
Suppliers with Unknown Costs and Limited Precision................. 102
Athanasios Papakonstantinou, Alex Rogers, Enrico H. Gerding, and
Nicholas R. Jennings
Nash Social Welfare in Multiagent Resource Allocation ............... 117
Sara Ramezani and Ulle Endriss
Leading a Best-Response Teammate in an Ad Hoc Team.............. 132
Peter Stone, Gal A. Kaminka, and Jeffrey S. Rosenschein
Designing an Ad Auctions Game for the Trading Agent Competition ... 147
Patrick R. Jordan and Michael P. Wellman
Robust Planning and Control Using Intelligent Products.............. 163
Gerben G. Meyer and J.C. (Hans) Wortmann
How Specialised Are Specialists? Generalisation Properties of Entries
from the 2008 and 2009 TAC Market Design Competitions ............ 178
Edward Robinson, Peter McBurney, and Xin Yao
X Table of Contents
Learning Improved Entertainment Trading Strategies for the TAC
Travel Game .................................................... 195
L. Julian Schvartzman and Michael P. Wellman
Evaluation of Market Design Agents: The Mertacor Perspective........ 211
Lampros C. Stavrogiannis and Pericles A. Mitkas
Continuous Double Auctions with Execution Uncertainty ............. 226
Gert van Valkenhoef, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,
Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Nicholas R. Jennings, and
Rineke Verbrugge
Sequential Auctions with Partially Substitutable Goods............... 242
Ioannis A. Vetsikas and Nicholas R. Jennings
From General Game Descriptions to a Market Specification Language
for General Trading Agents ....................................... 259
Michael Thielscher and Dongmo Zhang
Author Index.................................................. 275
A Study of Central Auction Based Wholesale
Electricity Markets
Sofia Ceppi and Nicola Gatti
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione,
Politecnico di Milano
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, I-20133 Milano, Italy
{ceppi,ngatti}@elet.polimi.it
Abstract. The deregulation of electricity markets produced significant
economic benefits, reducing prices to customers and opening several
opportunities for new actors, e.g., new generators and distributors. A
prominent scientific and technological challenge is the automation of
such markets. In particular, we focus our attention on wholesale elec-
tricity markets based on a central auction. In these markets, generators
sell electricity by means of a central auction to a public authority. In-
stead, the distribution of electricity to customers takes part in retail
markets. The main works presented in the literature model wholesale
markets as oligopolies, neglecting thus the specific auction mechanism.
In thispaper, we enrich thesemodels byintroducing an auction mecha-
nism shapedonthatused intheItalian wholesale electricity market,we
solvethewinnerdetermination problem,andwepreliminarily studythe
problem of searching for equilibria.
1 Introduction
The deregulation of electricity markets is producing significant economic bene-
fits [1,2], reducing electricity prices to customers and opening several opportu-
nities for new actors, e.g., new generators and distributors. These markets can
be different, ranging from those in which generators sell electricity to a cen-
tralauction to those in which they bilaterallynegotiate with customers[1,3]. In
this paper, we focus oncentral auctionbased markets and, in particular,onthe
Italian electricity market.
Electricitymarketsaregeographicallystructuredinlocalregions,inwhichsev-
eral generators, distributors, and customers operate. A transport network with
bounded capacity connects all the local regions. The peculiarity of the Italian
electricitymarketlaysinthetransportnetworktopology:givenanypairoflocal
regions, there is a unique path connecting them.
Central auction based electricity markets develop into two stages [1]. In the
first stage, called wholesale market, all the generators sell electricity to a public
authority, called unique purchaser (UP) [4]. The sale is based on a central auc-
tion supported by an electronic marketplace, called electricity market manager
(EMM)[2],that collectsallthe generators’bids anddetermines whichareto be
E.Davidetal.(Eds.):AMEC/TADA2009,LNBIP59,pp.1–14,2010.
(cid:2)c Springer-VerlagBerlinHeidelberg2010