Bidding Strategies for Realistic Multi-Unit Sealed-Bid Auctions

Vetsikas, I. A. and Jennings, N. R. (2008) Bidding Strategies for Realistic Multi-Unit Sealed-Bid Auctions. In: 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08), July 13-17, 2008, Chicago, USA. pp. 182-189.

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Abstract

When autonomous agents decide on their bidding strategies
in real world auctions, they have a number of concerns that
go beyond the models that are normally analyzed in traditional
auction theory. Oftentimes, the agents have budget
constraints and the auctions have a reserve price, both of
which restrict the bids the agents can place. In addition, their
attitude need not be risk-neutral and they may have uncertainty
about the value of the goods they are buying. Some of
these issues have been examined individually for single-unit
sealed-bid auctions. In this paper, we extend this analysis to
the multi-unit case, and also analyze the multi-unit sealed-bid
auctions in which a combination of these issues are present,
for unit-demand bidders. This analysis constitutes the main
contribution of this paper. We then demonstrate the usefulness
in practice of this analysis; we show in simulations that
taking into account all these issues allows the bidders to maximize
their utility. Furthermore, using this analysis allows a
seller to improve her revenue, i.e. by selecting the optimal
reserve price.
Introduction