A Long-Term Profit Seeking Strategy for Continuous Double Auctions in a Trading Agent Competition

Abstract. This paper presents a new bidding strategy for continuous double auctions (CDA) designed for Mertacor, a successful trading agent, which won the first price in the “travel game ” of Trading Agent Competition (TAC) for 2005. TAC provides a realistic benchmarking environment in which various travel commodities are offered in simultaneous online auctions. Among these, entertainment tickets are traded in CDA. The latter, represent the most dynamic part of the TAC game, in which agents are both sellers and buyers. In a CDA many uncertainty factors are introduced, because prices are constantly changing during the game and price fluctuations are hard to be predicted. In order to deal with these factors of uncertainty we have designed a strategy based on achieving a pre-defined long-term profit. This preserves the bidding attitude of our agent and shows flexibility in changes of the environment. We finally present and discuss the results of TAC-05, as well as an analysis of agents performance in the entertainment auctions.