Chuan Yue, Shingo Mabu, and Kotaro Hirasawa

Abstract:
The agent-based auction mechanism widely used in web sites and originally designed for trading goods for customers might not be the most efficient one in the future, while there is a demand of automated auction agents, which are adaptable to the dynamic auction environments. To this end, this paper discusses how to apply Genetic Network Programming (GNP) to automated auction agents in order to make a bid efficiently and effectively at each time step according to the auction environments, and Multiple Round English Auction (MREA) mechanism studied in this paper is based on multi-agent systems, which aims to help the buyer to procure profitable deals as much as possible. GNPbased agent is compared with other agents using conventional strategies in MREA. It has been found from the simulations that the proposed method could help agents to evolve their strategies generation by generation, which shows that GNP has a good performance of helping the agent to find the suitable strategy under various situations and outperform than other strategies.

Keywords: genetic network programming, bidding strategy, agent-based multiple round English auction