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A Probabilistic Approach to Automated Bidding in Alternative Auctions

Dumas, Marlon and Aldred, Lachlan J. and Governatori, Guido and ter Hofstede, Arthur H.M. and Russell, Nick (2002) A Probabilistic Approach to Automated Bidding in Alternative Auctions. In Proceedings 11th International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW), pages pp. 99-108, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

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Abstract

This paper presents an approach to develop bidding agents that participate in multiple alternative auctions, with the goal of obtaining an item at the lowest price. The approach consists of a prediction method and a planning algorithm. The prediction method exploits the history of past auctions in order to build probability functions capturing the belief that a bid of a given price may win a given auction. The planning algorithm computes the lowest price, such that by sequentially bidding in a subset of the relevant auctions, the agent can obtain the item at that price with an acceptable probability. The approach addresses the case where the auctions are for substitutable items with different values. Experimental results are reported, showing that the approach increases the payoff of their users and the welfare of the market.

Item Type:Conference Paper
Status:Published
Keywords:online auction; automated bidding; e-commerce agent
Subjects:Subjects UNSPECIFIED
ID Code:1786
Deposited By:Dumas, Marlon
Deposited On:06 July 2005
Alternative Locations:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/511446.511460
Copyright Owner:Copyright 2002 ACM Press
Copyright Statement:Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.
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