Designing bidding strategies for trading agents in electronic auctions

Auction-based electronic commerce is an increasingly interesting domain for developing trading agents. In this paper we present our first contributions towards the construction of such agents by introducing both a formal and a more pragmatical approach for the design of bidding strategies that provide buyer agents with useful heuristic guidelines to participate in auction-based tournaments. On the one hand, our formal view relies on possibilistic-based decision theory as the means of handling possibilistic uncertainty on the consequences of actions due to the lack of knowledge about the other agents´ behaviour. On the other hand for practical reasons we also propose a two-fold method for decision making that does not require the evaluation of the whole set of alternative actions. This approach utilizes global (market-centered) probabilistic information in a first decision step which is subsequently refined by a second decision step based on the individual (rival-centered) possibilistic information induced from the memory of cases composing the history of tournaments. In this way, the resulting bidding strategy balances the agent´s short-term benefits, related to the probabilistic information, with its long-term benefits, related to the possibilistic information