Strategy and mechanism lessons from the first ad auctions trading agent competition

The inaugural tournament for the Trading Agent Competition Ad Auctions game was held in July 2009. We describe the results, identifying key strategic behavior of the top agents in the competition. Through post-tournament simulation, we construct an empirical game using the agents and mechanism from the competition, and derive equilibria of this game. We then vary the auction mechanism used in simulation, and construct and solve an empirical game for each respective mechanism. Using the derived equilibria as predictions of play, we analyze revenue implications of these mechanism variations.

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