Autonomous Bidding Agents: Strategies and Lessons from the Trading Agent Competition **

Title: Autonomous Bidding Agents: Strategies and Lessons from the Trading Agent Competition **

Abstract:

Years of observing, analyzing, and competing in the Trading Agent Competition
(TAC) have taught us much about the potential of automated bidders, and principles underlying their design. I will share some of the highlights of our experience with the TAC travel game, including:
1. a prevailing architecture based on prediction plus optimization, 2. a taxonomy of heuristics for bidding under uncertainty in interdependent markets, and 3. an empirical game-theoretic methodology for evaluating strategy ideas.

**This title and much of the content of the talk come from a book by this name written with Amy Greenwald and Peter Stone, forthcoming from MIT Press.