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An English Auction Protocol for Multi-attribute Items
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In this paper, we suggest using an English Auction Protocol for a procurement multi-attribute auction in which the item for sale is defined by several attributes, the buyer agent is the auctioneer, and the seller agents are the bidders. Such domains include auctions on task al- location, services, or compound products. At the beginning of the auc- tion the buyer agent announces the required properties of the item, and then various seller agents propose bids, which are composed of specific configurations that match its request. Each proposed bid should be bet- ter for the buyer agent than the previous bid, w.r.t. the announced re- quirements of the buyer agent. Finally, the last suggested bid will win, and the seller agent that suggested this bid will be committed to it. We consider two utility function models for the English auction protocols and provide the optimal bidding strategies for the seller agents and the optimal auction design for the buyer agents regarding both models.
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... Teich [18] divided the multi-attribute into two stages in the relevant literature, i.e. good attributes and supplier attributes, and pointed out that the combination multi-attribute procurement had more realistic meaning and he made it a further research direction. David et al. [19] discussed the three-attribute procurement auction model based on the background of international logistics market and chose the concrete linear scoring function to determine the winner. ...
In this paper, the decision making problem of electricity coal procurement in power industry is investigated and a two-stage compound mechanism based on auction and negotiation is designed for multi-attribute and multi-source procurement of electricity coal. In the first stage of this compound mechanism, a multi-attribute auction mechanism of electricity coal is designed. Concretely, the buyer's utility function and the supplier's utility function are defined, and the scoring rules and bidding rules are given. Moreover, aiming at maximizing the buyer's expected utility, an optimization model of selecting winners in multi-attribute auction of electricity coal is established; then, the suppliers' optimal bidding strategies are discussed and the feasibility of auction mechanism is proved. Based on the winners' scheme and corresponding pre-allocation results of electricity coal supply in the auction stage, a negotiation mechanism, which can further improve the allocation efficiency and optimize the attribute combination, is designed in the second stage of this compound mechanism and the bidding efficiency is calculated by using the method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for each winner. Finally, the specific implementation steps are given to show how to apply this two-stage compound mechanism in the actual procurement of electricity coal.
... In the following, we discuss them in terms of how they reflect the users' attitudes to risk in aggregation. We focus on risk here because it provides a well understood framework for characterising the types of nuance that are crucial to the flexible decision making we aim to capture 9,17 . More specifically, we make the standard assumption that users can exhibit three broad types of attitude toward risk 43 : risk-seeking (optimistic), riskaverse (pessimistic) or risk-neutral (neutral). ...
In Ref. 27, Luo and Jennings identify and analyse the complete spectrum of compromise aggregation operators that can be used to model the various attitudes that decision-making agents can have toward risk in aggregation. In this paper, we extend these operators to deal with aggregation when the ratings have different degrees of importance. Specifically, we generalise the method of weighted uninorms to handle this issue. We choose this approach because uninorm compromise operators are a kind of common ones, and their weighted counterparts, which are widely accepted, can cover other common operators, such as weighted t-norms and t-conorms, as special cases. As per the analysis of weighted uninorms, we identify common properties that the weighting operators of the various compromise operators should satisfy, and in so doing, we introduce the concept of a general weighting operator for compromise operators and reveal the different properties that a specific type of weighting operator should obey. This, in turn, defines the concepts of the various weighting operators of the various compromise operators. We then go onto discuss the construction issue of weighting operators associated with the various compromise operators.
Bid evaluation plays an important role in reverse auctions, as it determines the winner. By the assumption of bounded rationality, the fairness of bid evaluation is influenced by the behavior and management strategy of the referees. In this article, a tripartite game model between the technical experts, the business experts, and the management department is constructed for grouped multiattribute reserve auctions. The static equilibrium strategies and the factors that affect the equilibrium behavior of each player are analyzed by evolutionary game theory. Finally, to study the behaviors of three subjects, a simulation system is established on MATLAB GUI that quantitatively indicates the effect of initial conditions and related parameter changes on the evolution results, and then the corresponding management strategies are provided. It is demonstrated that the behaviors of each party will evolve in a favorable direction by adjusting the model parameters. This article contributes to predict the behavioral evolution of bid evaluation participants and improve the fairness in bid evaluation.
Auctions have known considerable and continuous growth during the past decades due to their logic and efficiency in price formation when the value of goods traded is not known or varies. Although earlier research has been based mainly on Microeconomics and Games Theory, recent advances extended relevant research in Operational Research and Information Technology. Today, auctions and their applications form a challenging topic not only for economists but for operational researchers, marketers, logisticians and management engineers. This paper examines contemporary emerging auction formats, including auctions in which bids consist of many other parameters. The study of these emerging auction formats proceeds through the analysis of critical auction parameters that directly affect the decision-making process and the problems that auction participants face. This paper presents, with a presentation in graphical form, the decision framework for the majority of approaches presented in contemporary literature to highlight the association between decision elements and auction design.
This paper proposes a two-stage multi-attribute auction mechanism for market price discovery and to determine the winning bidder. In the first stage, the buyer announces a multi-attribute value function and a set of budget levels. The bidders submit sealed-bids for quality attributes against each budget level announced. The buyer uses the proposed procedure to estimate the cost function of each vendor and to determine the reservation quality for prequalification. Using these estimated cost functions, the buyer derives the optimal scoring function. In the second stage, the buyer announces the scoring function and conducts an open bid ascending auction using the qualified set of vendors from the first stage to determine the winner. The main purpose of the mechanism is to provide detailed information to the buyer about the procurement environment. This helps the buyer to make informed decisions while designing an appropriate scoring function. We showed that the proposed mechanism induces competitive bids from the vendors and there is no incentive for them to deviate from quality values submitted in the first stage.
Advances in electronic-commerce (e-commerce) have resulted in significant progress towards strategies, requirements, and development of e-commerce applications. With the increasing number of e-commerce services over mobile devices, there are certain issues to be resolved before the deployment of complete mobile e-commerce (m-commerce). The various kinds of issues that can be generally classified in mobile e-commerce are technological (network, client, software, etc.) and application (user interface, security, etc.) issues and in particular the issues in auctioning process are classified into service discovery, customization, closing price prediction, and bidding categories. Recently, agent technology is playing a dominant role in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), distributed computing, and Internet commerce. Agents are set to represent on behalf of customers and vendors in m-commerce to resolve the various issues in the near future. This chapter presents the various issues in m-commerce including issues in English auctions as the major focus that needs to be tackled to make m-commerce successful in the coming years. It provides solutions to some of the challenges by employing cognitive agents. It also presents architectures, techniques, and surveys of the auctioning process in mobile e-commerce.
The existing models all have a rigid assumption that the bidders are symmetrical. To improve the limitation of these models, reverse multi-attribute English auction model based on the asymmetric bidders is established. The new auction model includes the constraints of the minimum value of bidding quality attributes. The improvement of the model makes up the defect that existing models do not consider the auctioneer's usually objective demand of the minimum value of bidding quality attributes in the reality. Finally, based on the new auction model, the author gives the structurized optimal bidding strategies and describes the process of auction and one example. The research results apply to online automatic procurement and bidders' decision support through the combination of reverse multi-attribute auction and information technology.
Today more and more enterprises procured the goods and services based on reverse auction mechanisms. But the traditional price-based single attribute auction mechanisms had not satisfied the practical demand. In view of this situation, we studied the multi-attribute sealed-bid auction mechanism in procurement environment. First, we proposed an improved multi-attribute auction model based on the limitation of the existed models, and then we further studied the bidders' optimal bidding strategies in sealed-bid auction mechanism based on multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT). In particular, we proved an important inference which can be used to determine the non-price attributes. At last, we analyzed the influence of the model parameters on the optimal bidding strategies.
Auctions have been used in the procurement of heterogeneous products, produced and delivered after the auctions conclude, as well as services. In these situations the quasi-linearity assumption of the buyer and the sellers is violated and the price and other attributes are interrelated. The relationship between price and other attributes is illustrated here with two exchanges in which the market participants are characterized by Cobb-Douglass production functions. It shown that even in the simplest case, when the contract curve is linear, the price and other attributes are interrelated. This relationship becomes more complex for non-linear contract curves. The paper shows that in these cases the auction does not maximize social welfare, i.e., it is an inefficient mechanism. Furthermore, even if the winning bid is an efficient solution, a winwin solution which dominates this bid may be possible. The buyer needs to engage in multi-bilateral negotiations in order to seek joint-improvements. The purpose of the negotiation is to search for side-payments.
Multi-attribute auction is a kind of market mechanisms, which enable automated negotiation on multiple attributes of a deal. In order to know the research history and the newest research trends for the research on multi-attribute auctions, this paper presents widespread theoretical and applications problems of multi-attribute auctions in the fields of auction automatic control and mechatronic engineering . The multi-attribute auction models are divided into two kinds (i.e. game theory model and decision theory model). Assumptions, main ideas, and conclusions of literature related to these two kinds of models are reviewed and commented.
We extend Sandholm’s bidtree-based IDA* algorithm for combinatorial auction winner determination to deal with negotiation
over tasks with precedence constraints. We evaluate its performance, and show that the order of items in the bidtree has a major impact on performance. Specifically, performance is enhanced if the items with the largest
numbers of bids are at the top of the bidtree. This is due to the fact that the effective branching factor in the search tree
is controlled by the number of bids returned from a query to the bidtree, which in turn is strongly related to its construction.
There are some classical decision rules such as dominance, maximin and maximum which are still fit for the MADM environment. They do not require the DM’s preference information, and accordingly yield the objective (vs. subjective) solution. However, the right selection of these methods for the right situation is important. (See Table 1.3 for references).
Combinatorial auctions, that is, auctions where bidders can bid on combinations of items, tend to lead to more efficient allocations than traditional auction mechanisms in multi-item auctions where the agents' valuations of the items are not additive. However, determining the winners so as to maximize revenue is -complete. First, we analyze existing approaches for tackling this problem: exhaustive enumeration, dynamic programming, and restricting the allowable combinations. Second, we study the possibility of approximate winner determination, proving inapproximability in the general case, and discussing approximation algorithms for special cases. We then present our search algorithm for optimal winner determination. Experiments are shown on several bid distributions which we introduce. The algorithm allows combinatorial auctions to scale up to significantly larger numbers of items and bids than prior approaches to optimal winner determination by capitalizing on the fact that the space of bids is sparsely populated in practice. The algorithm does this by provably sufficient selective generation of children in the search tree, by using a secondary search for fast child generation, by using heuristics that are admissible and optimized for speed, and by preprocessing the search space in four ways. Incremental winner determination and quote computation techniques are presented.
Auctions are a fundamental mechanism to automating negotiations in electronic commerce. We investigate multi-attribute auctions, an economic mechanism, which automates negotiation on multiple attributes of a deal. In this approach, we combine decision analysis techniques and single-sided auction mechanisms in order to procure goods and services. The paper describes an experimental analysis of multi-attribute auctions. First, we will provide an overview of the preliminary game-theoretical and simulation results. Then we will introduce a Web-based implementation of the mechanism and describe the design and the results of an experiment analyzing the economic behavior of multi-attribute auction formats. In the experiment, the utility scores achieved in multi-attribute auctions were significantly higher than those of single-attribute auctions. The efficiency was similar in single-attribute and multi-attribute auctions, and we did not find evidence for revenue equivalence between the multi-attribute auction formats.
Combinatorial auctions, where bidders can submit bids on bundles of items, are attractive when the bidders' valuations on bundles exhibit complementarity and/or substitutability. An important problem is that of eliciting the bidders' preferences so that they do not have to bid on all combinations. We present a new family of preference elicitation algorithms. The algorithms in this family do not rely on absolute bids, but rather on relative (differential) value information. This holds the promise to reduce revelation and communication significantly. We develop a differential-elicitation algorithm that finds the efficient allocation of items to the bidders, and as a side-effect, the Vickrey payments (which make truthful bidding incentive compatible). We also present two auction mechanisms that use differential elicitation.