A Descriptive Auction Language

Electronic markets and especially online auctions gain more and more importance and a plethora of market mechanisms is emerging on the Internet. The great variety of trading rules hinders agents easily switching between different marketplaces and, therefore, fragments the overall market – supply and demand might fail to meet due to agents' inability to interact with the same market mechanism. The problem can be overcome by a descriptive auction language (DAL) allowing for the machine‐readable specification of arbitrary auction mechanisms. The implications are twofold: on the one hand a market engineer can coherently describe a mechanism by means of the language and automatically deploy it via an auction runtime environment and, on the other hand, a (software) agent can automatically deduce valid and reasonable actions from the description of a previously unknown auction mechanism. All four authors are affiliated with the Institute of Information Systems and Management in the School of Economics and Busine...

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