Trading Agents Competing: Performance, Progress, and Market Effectiveness

The annual trading agent competition offers agent designers a forum for evaluating programmed trading techniques in a challenging market scenario. TAC aims to spur research by enabling researchers to compare techniques on a common problem and build on each other's ideas. A fixed set of assumptions and environment settings facilitates communication of methods and results. As a multiyear event, TAC lets researchers observe trading agents' progress over time, in effect accelerating the evolution of an adapted population of traders. Given all the participant effort invested, it is incumbent on us to learn as much from the experience as possible. After three years of TAC, we're ready to examine there we stand. To do this, we used data from actual TAC tournaments and some post-competition experimentation. We based our analysis almost entirely on outcomes (profits and allocations), with very little direct accounting for specific agent techniques.

[1]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  A Parametrization of the Auction Design Space , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[2]  T. Ishida,et al.  A Trading Agent Competition for the Research Community , 1999 .

[3]  Peter Stone,et al.  ATTac-2001: A Learning, Autonomous Bidding Agent , 2002, AMEC.

[4]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  SouthamptonTAC: Designing a Successful Trading Agent , 2002, ECAI.

[5]  Amy Greenwald.  The 2002 Trading Agent Competition: An Overview of Agent Strategies , 2003, AI Mag..

[6]  M. P. Wellman,et al.  Price Prediction in a Trading Agent Competition , 2004, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[7]  Peter Stone,et al.  Autonomous Bidding Agents in the Trading Agent Competition , 2001, IEEE Internet Comput..

[8]  Peter Stone.  Multiagent Competitions and Research: Lessons from RoboCup and TAC , 2002, RoboCup.

[9]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Walverine: a Walrasian trading agent , 2003, AAMAS '03.

[10]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Exploring bidding strategies for market-based scheduling , 2003, EC '03.

[11]  John Rust,et al.  The Double Auction Market , 1989 .

[12]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Flexible double auctions for electronic commerce: theory and implementation , 1998, Decis. Support Syst..

[13]  P. Taylor,et al.  Evolutionarily Stable Strategies and Game Dynamics , 1978 .

[14]  Klaus Dorer,et al.  Agent-oriented software engineering for successful TAC participation , 2002, AAMAS '02.

[15]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  The 2001 trading agent competition , 2002, Electron. Mark..

[16]  Norman M. Sadeh,et al.  TAC-03 - A Supply-Chain Trading Competition , 2003, AI Mag..

[17]  Bart Selman,et al.  A principled study of the design tradeoffs for autonomous trading agents , 2003, AAMAS '03.

[18]  Rajarshi Das,et al.  Agent-Human Interactions in the Continuous Double Auction , 2001, IJCAI.

[19]  J. Meigs,et al.  WHO Technical Report , 1954, The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.

[20]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  SouthamptonTAC: An adaptive autonomous trading agent , 2003, TOIT.