Book announcement: autonomous bidding agents

Autonomous Bidding Agents distills the experiences and lessons learned from the international Trading Agent Competition (TAC) series. Motivated by TAC, a community of academic and industry researchers has been inventing and polishing techniques for autonomous bidding by software agents. We, the authors, have been both organizers of TAC and successful participants. As such, we have tackled the problems posed by TAC with our own independent efforts, and we have closely observed the evolution of approaches developed by the community as a whole. TAC is a stylized setting exemplary of the rapidly advancing domain of electronic marketplaces. It is also a benchmark, motivating researchers to apply innovative approaches to a common task. A key feature of TAC is that it provides an academic forum for open comparison of agent bidding strategies in a complex scenario, as opposed to, for example, automated trading in real-world securities markets, in which practitioners are less inclined to share their technologies. As the product of sustained focus and cross-fertilization of ideas over time, TAC provides a unique case study of the current capabilities and limitations of autonomous bidding agents.