Self-Confirming Price Prediction for Bidding in Simultaneous Ascending Auctions
In Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2005). July 2005.
Abstract
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this problem. We present a new family of decision-theoretic bidding strategies for this problem that use probabilistic predictions of final prices. We focus on self-confirming price distribution predictions, which by definition turn out to be correct when all agents bid decision-theoretically based on them. Bidding based on these is provably not optimal in general, but our experimental evidence indicates the strategy can be quite effective compared to other known methods.
BibTex
@inproceedings{ annaose-wellman-reeves-jmm_uai05_self-confirming,
month = "July",
author = "Anna V. Osepayshvili and Michael P. Wellman and Daniel M. Reeves and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2005)",
address = "University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland",
title = "Self-Confirming Price Prediction for Bidding in Simultaneous Ascending Auctions",
year = "2005"
}
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