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62
Achieving Budget-Balance with Vickrey-Based Payment Schemes in Exchanges
- In Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
, 2001
"... Generalized Vickrey mechanisms have received wide attention in the literature because they are efficient and strategyproof, i.e. truthful bidding is optimal whatever the bids of other agents. However it is well-known that it is impossible for an exchange, with multiple buyers and sellers, to be ..."
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Cited by 108 (20 self)
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Generalized Vickrey mechanisms have received wide attention in the literature because they are efficient and strategyproof, i.e. truthful bidding is optimal whatever the bids of other agents. However it is well-known that it is impossible for an exchange, with multiple buyers and sellers, to be efficient and budget-balanced, even putting strategy-proofness to one side. A market-maker in an efficient exchange must make more payments than it collects. We enforce budget-balance as a hard constraint, and explore payment rules to distribute surplus after an exchange clears to minimize distance to Vickrey payments. Different rules lead to different levels of truthrevelation and efficiency. Experimental and theoretical analysis suggest a simple Threshold scheme, which gives surplus to agents with payments further than a certain threshold value from their Vickrey payments. The scheme appears able to exploit agent uncertainty about bids from other agents to reduce manipulation and boost allocative efficiency in comparison with other simple rules.
Concurrent Auctions across the Supply Chain
, 2001
"... In this paper we design protocols for exchange of information between a sequence of markets along a single supply chain. These protocols allow each of these markets to function separately, while the information exchanged guarantees efficient global behavior across the supply chain. Each market form ..."
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Cited by 46 (2 self)
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In this paper we design protocols for exchange of information between a sequence of markets along a single supply chain. These protocols allow each of these markets to function separately, while the information exchanged guarantees efficient global behavior across the supply chain. Each market form a link in the supply chain operates as a double auction, where the bids on one side of the double auction come from bidders in the corresponding segment of the industry, and the bids on the other side are synthetically generated by the protocol to express the combined information from all other links in the chain. The double auctions in each of the markets can be of several types, and we study several variants of incentive compatible double auctions, comparing them in terms of their efficiency and of the market revenue.
Decentralized supply chain formation: A market protocol and competitive equilibrium analysis
- Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
, 2003
"... Supply chain formation is the process of determining the structure and terms of exchange relationships to enable a multilevel, multiagent production activity. We present a simple model of supply chains, highlighting two characteristic features: hierarchical subtask decomposition, and resource conten ..."
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Cited by 45 (4 self)
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Supply chain formation is the process of determining the structure and terms of exchange relationships to enable a multilevel, multiagent production activity. We present a simple model of supply chains, highlighting two characteristic features: hierarchical subtask decomposition, and resource contention. To decentralize the formation process, we introduce a market price system over the resources produced along the chain. In a competitive equilibrium for this system, agents choose locally optimal allocations with respect to prices, and outcomes are optimal overall. To determine prices, we define a market protocol based on distributed, progressive auctions, and myopic, non-strategic agent bidding policies. In the presence of resource contention, this protocol produces better solutions than the greedy protocols common in the artificial intelligence and multiagent systems literature. The protocol often converges to high-value supply chains, and when competitive equilibria exist, typically to approximate competitive equilibria. However, complementarities in agent production technologies can cause the protocol to wastefully allocate inputs to agents that do not produce their outputs. A subsequent decommitment phase recovers a significant fraction of the lost surplus. 1.
Managing online auctions: Current business and research issues
- Management Science
, 2003
"... The Internet’s computational power and flexibility have made auctions a widespread and integral part of both consumer and business markets. Though online auctions are a multibillion dollar annual activity, with a growing variety of sophisticated trading mechanisms, scientific research on them is at ..."
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Cited by 32 (0 self)
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The Internet’s computational power and flexibility have made auctions a widespread and integral part of both consumer and business markets. Though online auctions are a multibillion dollar annual activity, with a growing variety of sophisticated trading mechanisms, scientific research on them is at an early stage. This paper analyzes the current state of management science research on online auctions. It develops a broad research agenda for issues such as the behavior of online auction participants, the optimal design of online auctions, the integration of auctions into the ongoing operation of firms, and the use of the data generated by online auctions to inform future trading mechanisms. These research areas will draw from applied and theoretical work spanning management science, economics, and information systems. (Auctions; Internet) 1.
Incentive-Compatible, Budget-Balanced, yet Highly Efficient Auctions for Supply Chain Formation
- In Decision Support Systems. In
, 2004
"... We address the mechanism design problem of supply chain formation---the problem of negotiation mechanisms to coordinate the buying and selling of goods in multiple markets across a supply chain. Because effective negotiation strategies can be difficult to design for supply chains, we focus on incent ..."
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Cited by 31 (7 self)
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We address the mechanism design problem of supply chain formation---the problem of negotiation mechanisms to coordinate the buying and selling of goods in multiple markets across a supply chain. Because effective negotiation strategies can be difficult to design for supply chains, we focus on incentive compatible auctions, in which the agents' dominant strategy is to simply report their private information truthfully. Unfortunately, with two-sided negotiation, characteristic of supply chains, it is impossible to simultaneously achieve perfect efficiency, budget balance, and individual rationality with incentive compatibility. To resolve this problem we introduce auctions that explicitly discard profitable trades, thus giving up perfect efficiency to maintain budget balance, incentive compatibility and individual rationality. We use a novel payment rule based on Vickrey-Clarke-Groves payments, but adapted to our allocation rule. The first auction we present is incentive compatible when each agent desires only a single bundle of goods, the auction correctly knows all agents' bundles of interest, but the monetary valuations are private to the agents. We introduce extensions to maintain incentive compatibility when the auction does not know the agents' bundles of interest. We establish a good worst case bound on efficiency when the bundles of interest are known, which also applies in some cases when the bundles are not known. Our auctions produce higher efficiency for a broader class of supply chains than any other incentive compatible, individually rational, and budget-balanced auction we are aware of.
Constructing and Clearing Combinatorial Exchanges Using Preference Elicitation
, 2002
"... Combinatorial exchanges arise naturally in multi-agent systems that execute hierarchically decomposed tasks, when the agents have uncertainty about each other's tasks and each other's capability of handling tasks. In a combinatorial exchange, the information is aggregated to one party who ..."
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Cited by 29 (10 self)
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Combinatorial exchanges arise naturally in multi-agent systems that execute hierarchically decomposed tasks, when the agents have uncertainty about each other's tasks and each other's capability of handling tasks. In a combinatorial exchange, the information is aggregated to one party who then decides the task allocation among the agents. Unfortunately, such exchanges can require that bidders calculate and communicate an exponential number of bids, each of which may involve solving a hard planning problem. We present a design for an auctioneer agent that can construct and clear a combinatorial exchange using preference elicitation. This design extends existing analyses of elicitation in the combinatorial auction to the combinatorial exchange. We also introduce the concept of item discovery that uses elicitation to construct the exchange when there is uncertainty about which items should be considered in the market. Our experimental results, in a multi-robot exploration domain, show that elicitation significantly reduces the number of bids that must be evaluated in order to clear the market. More important, the proportion of bids that must be evaluated decreases as we scale to larger problem instances. We also present experimental results for an anytime version of the elicitation algorithm.
An Integer Programming Formulation Of The Bid Evaluation Problem For Coordinated Tasks
- Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets, volume 127 of IMA Volumes in Mathematics and its Applications
, 2001
"... We extend the IP models proposed by Nisan and Andersson for winner determination in combinatorial auctions, to the problem of evaluating bids for coordinated task sets. This requires relaxing the free disposal assumption, and encoding temporal constraints in the model. We present a basic model, alon ..."
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Cited by 25 (9 self)
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We extend the IP models proposed by Nisan and Andersson for winner determination in combinatorial auctions, to the problem of evaluating bids for coordinated task sets. This requires relaxing the free disposal assumption, and encoding temporal constraints in the model. We present a basic model, along with an improved model that dramatically reduces the number of rows by preprocessing the temporal constraints into compatibility constraints. Experimental results show how the models perform and scale, and how they compare with a stochastic solver based on Simulated Annealing. On average, the IP approach finds optimum solutions significantly faster than Simulated Annealing, but with an extreme level of variability that may make it impractical in time-constrained agent negotiation scenarios.
Combinatorial auctions for electronic business,” Sadhana: Indian academy
- Proceedings in Engineering Sciences
, 2005
"... Abstract. Combinatorial auctions (CAs) have recently generated significant interest as an automated mechanism for buying and selling bundles of goods. They are proving to be extremely useful in numerous e-business applications such as eselling, e-procurement, e-logistics, and B2B exchanges. In this ..."
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Cited by 15 (8 self)
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Abstract. Combinatorial auctions (CAs) have recently generated significant interest as an automated mechanism for buying and selling bundles of goods. They are proving to be extremely useful in numerous e-business applications such as eselling, e-procurement, e-logistics, and B2B exchanges. In this article, we introduce combinatorial auctions and bring out important issues in the design of combinatorial auctions. We also highlight important contributions in current research in this area. This survey emphasizes combinatorial auctions as applied to electronic business situations.
An Iterative Generalized Vickrey Auction: Strategy-Proofness without Complete Revelation
, 2001
"... The generalized Vickrey auction (GVA) is a strategy-proof combinatorial auction, in which truthful bidding is the optimal strategy for an agent. In this paper we address a fundamental problem with the GVA, which is that it requires agents to compute and reveal their values for all combinations ..."
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Cited by 15 (5 self)
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The generalized Vickrey auction (GVA) is a strategy-proof combinatorial auction, in which truthful bidding is the optimal strategy for an agent. In this paper we address a fundamental problem with the GVA, which is that it requires agents to compute and reveal their values for all combinations of items. This can be very difficult for bounded-rational agents with limited or costly computation. We propose an experimental design for an iterative combinatorial auction. We have a theoretical proof that the the auction implements the outcome of the Vickrey auction in special cases, and initial experimental results support our conjecture that the auction implements the outcome of the Vickrey auction in all cases.
Experimentation with local consensus ontologies with implications for automated service composition
- IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng
, 2005
"... Abstract—Agent technologies represent a promising approach for the integration of interorganizational capabilities across distributed, networked environments. However, knowledge sharing interoperability problems can arise when agents incorporating differing ontologies try to synchronize their intern ..."
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Cited by 14 (4 self)
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Abstract—Agent technologies represent a promising approach for the integration of interorganizational capabilities across distributed, networked environments. However, knowledge sharing interoperability problems can arise when agents incorporating differing ontologies try to synchronize their internal information. Moreover, in practice, agents may not have a common or global consensus ontology that will facilitate knowledge sharing and integration of functional capabilities. We propose a method to enable agents to develop a local consensus ontology during operation time as needed. By identifying similarities in the ontologies of their peer agents, a set of agents can discover new concepts/relations and integrate them into a local consensus ontology on demand. We evaluate this method, both syntactically and semantically, when forming local consensus ontologies with and without the use of a lexical database. We also report on the effects when several factors, such as the similarity measure, the relation search level depth, and the merge order, are varied. Finally, experimenting in the domain of agent-supported Web service composition, we demonstrate how our method allows us to successfully autonomously form service-oriented local consensus ontologies. Index Terms—Ontologies in agent-based information systems, agent-mediated electronic commerce. 1
