This book provides a new bidding strategy for agents to adopt in continuous double auctions (CDAs) and proposes some generally used tools to enhance the performance of existing bidding strategies in CDAs. It is the first book to focus on CDAs where a limited amount of seller agents and buyer agents trade what they want. The superior performance of the new bidding strategy and the tools proposed by this book are illustrated through extensive experiments.

The advancement of computer technology is playing an important role in almost all fields in the construction industry in the current era. It has become a tool for exchanging legal contract information, including bid data. In the traditional closed bidding system, the bidders were unaware of their competitors' bid quotes and had no opportunity available to make a counter an offer to the bid at a different level. However, in reverse auction bidding (RAB), contractors can track their competitors' bids and take the given opportunity to re-bid the projects at lower rates. Unlike traditional auctions, where buyers raise their purchasing prices to outbid competitors, reverse auctions permit buyers to purchase goods and services from suppliers who are encouraged to sell them at the lowest price. The benefit of the reverse auction bidding is either that the vendors are able to re-bid, or lower their bid multiple times. This is an example of transparent economic information. Van Vleet initiated the ongoing Reverse Auction Bidding study at Texas A & M University. Van Vleet had created a Microsoft Access database system and ASP web based user interface for RAB study. The methodology developed by van Vleet is still being used today, and this study has been extended into analyzing different personality types and the impact on the bidding system. In the previous studies conducted by different researchers in TAMU, the performance of participants in the RAB process along with their behavior are being observed with respect to their personality. Personality of each player is tested using the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) test. The previous study states that there appears to be a strong correlation between personality type and game performance. The first case study conducted by van Vleet involved five participants who had no prior experience in Reverse Auction Bidding. The number of participants has varied from three to ten participants. This research has been conducted on graduate students of the Construction Science Department of TAMU who have no prior experience in RAB. In continuation with the previous studies held in TAMU, the results show that there is an observable pattern in the bidding strategy of first time bidders while taking part in Reverse Auction Bidding.

In recent years, auctions have become an important field and many markets have designed new and sophisticated auction models to assign different types of items. The prime goal of this book is to set an organized classification of the main auction mechanisms in a way that readers can understand the importance of auction design and the advantages and drawbacks of each model. Given the relevance of the subject, there is a great volume of research about this topic. Nevertheless, most of these contributions use complex mathematical language difficult to understand for the average reader. In this book, the authors summarize the main ideas of the auction theory and explain them with simple language and plenty of examples. This book is a good starting point for any researcher interested in embracing the auction design as it also includes numerous real-world examples to engage the reader in the topic. “This book fills an important gap by making the main ideas and findings of auction research accessible.” Professor Paul Milgrom, Department of Economics, Stanford University.

A synthesis of theoretical and practical research on combinatorial auctions from the perspectives of economics, operations research, and computer science.

Iterative combinatorial auctions (ICAs) are IT-based economic mechanisms in which bidders submit bundle bids iteratively and the auctioneer computes allocations and ask prices in each auction round. In addition to strategic problems, the design of such auction formats exhibits hard computational problems. More recently, researchers have focused on the pricing and information feedback in ICAs. This book presents the results of 5 years research in this field, whereas the emphasis was put on the practical applicability of considered auction designs and pricing mechanisms in these auctions. The main topic of this book is a comprehensive comparison of the most important auction designs proposed in the literature by means of computational and laboratory experiments. Additionally, the book presents a new auction design ALPS, which has been shown very efficient and robust in many settings. In laboratory experiments all considered auction designs were tested for practical applicability and robustness against diverse bidding strategies.

Auctions involve trading of variety of different items. Auctions that allow agents to bid for combinations of items are called Combinatorial Auctions (CAs). The Ascending k-Bundle Auction(AkBA) is a combinatorial auction founded on a notion of bundle price equilibrium. The purpose of this research is to explore the strategy space and help agents evolve strategies for a Proxy version of A1BA(P-AkBA). We use a Genetic algorithm to search the space of strategies. Several experiments were performed for different categories of problems and the resultsshow that the approach yields good solutions. We compare the outcomes of the evolved solutions with the outcomes that result from truthful bidding, and compare prices against those generated in the sealed-bid version of k-bundle auction and the standard GVA payments. We also make several observations about the effect of genetic parameters on the performance of search.