Archive for the ‘Mechanism design’ Category

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JAAMAS Special Issue on MBC

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Thanks to the editors of the journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, we have prepared a special issue on the topic of the [tag]Market-Based Control[/tag] of Computational Systems.   The special issue editors’ Introduction to the issue can be found here.  

There were six papers accepted for the special issue after peer-review by anonymous reviewers:  

  • Borissov N, Neumann D, Weinhardt C: Automated bidding in computational markets: An application in market-based allocation of computing services.
  • Lewis PR, Marrow P, Yao X: Resource allocation in decentralised computational systems: An evolutionary market-based approach.
  • Niu J, Cai K, Parsons S, McBurney P, Gerding E: What the 2007 TAC Market Design Game tells us about effective auction mechanisms.
  • Sarne D, Manisterski E, Kraus S:  Multi-goal economic search using dynamic search structures.  
  • Phelps S, McBurney P, Parsons S: Evolutionary mechanism design: A review.
  • Vetsikas IA, Jennings NR: Bidding strategies for realistic multi-unit sealed-bid auctions.

We are very grateful to all those submitted papers to the special issue and to the preceeding international workshop, and to those who undertook peer reviews of the submissions.  The papers will be available from the journal web-pages in due course.

 

Posted in CAT Tournament, Computer science, Conferences, Economic theory, Game theory, Mechanism design | Comments Off

SIGecom Exchanges 8.1

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

The latest issue of SIGecom Exchanges (volume 8.1), newsletter of the ACM Special Interest Group on e-Commerce, has just been published, and is available from here.

Posted in Computer science, Economic theory, Game theory, Mechanism design | Comments Off

Auction-mania at Google

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Wired magazine recently ran an article about the use of auctions to allocate advertising space on Google searches.   One interesting fact is that [tag]Google[/tag] runs a real-time auction for advertising slots each and every time a search is undertaken — in other words, millions of [tag]auctions[/tag] per day!

“But as the business grew, Kamangar and Veach decided to price the slots on the side of the page by means of an auction. Not an eBay-style auction that unfolds over days or minutes as bids are raised or abandoned, but a huge marketplace of virtual auctions in which sealed bids are submitted in advance and winners are determined algorithmically in fractions of a second. Google hoped that millions of small and medium companies would take part in the market, so it was essential that the process be self-service. Advertisers bid on search terms, or keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they were bidding on a price they were willing to pay each time a user clicked on the ad. (The bid would be accompanied by a budget of how many clicks the advertiser was willing to pay for.) The new system was called AdWords Select . . .” 

 

 

Posted in Economic theory, Game theory, Mechanism design | Comments Off

2008 CAT Tournament winners

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

The 2008 TAC Market Design (or CAT) Tournament is now complete, and the winners are:

    First Place:        PersianCAT from Shiraz University, Iran
    Second Place:   MANX, from University of Michigan, USA
    Third Place:      jackaroo, from University of Western Sydney, Australia
    Prize for most successful new entrant: 

       DOG, from King’s College London, UK.

Congratulations to these four winners and to all the 2008 participants for a most successful tournament.

A full list of scores is available here.  Details of the 2008 CAT Tournament will be posted here later in 2008 or early in 2009.

 

Posted in CAT Tournament, Mechanism design | Comments Off

CAT 2008 Tournament: Update

Friday, June 6th, 2008

An update on the 2008 TAC Market Design Tournament ([tag]CAT2008[/tag]):

1.  We had hoped to have the final 2008 JCAT platform available for download by now, but it is still being finalized.  We hope to have it uploaded to sourceforge within the next week.   I apologize for this delay.

Our aim this year is to keep the operations and rules of the 2008 [tag]CAT Game[/tag]
very similar to the CAT game of 2007, in order that entrants may focus
mainly on strategy enhancement.    Accordingly, if you develop a specialist
able to operate under the current version of the JCAT platform (version
0.9), then you should not need to modify your specialist very much for it to
work with the 2008 game platform.

2.  Because of the delay in finalizing the JCAT platform modifications, we
will postpone the Trial Games.  These were originally scheduled for next
week, but we now plan to hold them during the week of 23 June 2008.

The main purpose of the trial games is to test inter-operability between
your specialist client machines and the game server at the University of
Liverpool.  Last year, there were problems accessing our server from clients
in some countries.  If you live in a country where access to our server is
precluded (for example, Iran), you will need to find a surrogate client in
another country to run your specialist for you.

We will require information about your client machine’s IP address and your
contact telephone details for the trial.  I will seek this information
nearer the trial dates.

3.  With the modifications to the [tag]JCAT[/tag] platform there will be some small
changes required to our supporting documentation.   These revisons will be
made shortly after the new JCAT version is uploaded and we will inform you
when these are uploaded.

4.  Updates will continue to be posted on the MBC CAT Tournament page, and on this Blog.

5.  The registration deadline for the 2008 CAT Game is very soon: Monday 10 June 2008.  Information on how to register is here.

6. If you wish to be included on our email list, please contact the CAT2008 Gamemaster, Peter McBurney, via the email address:  mcburney [at] liverpool.ac.uk

 

Posted in CAT Tournament, Computer science, Game theory, Mechanism design | Comments Off

Market-Based Control Workshop 2008

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

We are holding an International Workshop on the topic of Market-Based Control of Computational Systems in Liverpool, UK, on 1-2 September 2008.   The Call for Papers is printed below.

 

    ** CALL FOR PAPERS **

        International Workshop on
     MARKET-BASED CONTROL (MBC-2008)

         University of Liverpool
           Liverpool, UK

   1-2 September 2008

    http://www.marketbasedcontrol.com/
INTRODUCTION

The problems of understanding, modelling, and above all, managing the
complexity of large distributed systems are among the most pressing in
contemporary computer science. In recent years, there has been
increasing interest in the use of economic methods for the management
and control of complex computational systems. There are strong
arguments in favour of this use of economic mechanisms, but perhaps
the most compelling is simply that, for the most part, market
mechanisms have proved enormously effective in human societies. The
aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
the theory and practice of market/economic mechanisms for complex
computational systems.
TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- market mechanisms for control or regulation of computational and other systems
- mechanism design and synthesis for computational systems
- economic strategy design, synthesis, and analysis
- economic methods for resource & task allocation
- tools for market and mechanism analysis and design
INVITED SPEAKERS

* Amy Greenwald (Brown University, USA)
* Sarit Kraus (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
* Robert Marks (Australian Graduate School of Management, Australia)
* Peter Stone (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
IMPORTANT DATES

 3 July 2008:       Deadline for paper submission
 4 August 2008:     Notification of acceptance
 1-2 September 2008:  MBC-2008 Workshop

 

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Papers should be formatted using single column, 11pt, times roman font, and for A4 size paper,
and submitted in PDF format.  Two types of paper are invited for submission:

* Long papers, up to a maximum of 12 pages.

* Extended abstracts, up to a maximum of 4 pages.

Papers should be submitted as email attachments and sent before the deadline above to:

 mcburney [at] liverpool.ac.uk 

Submissions are not required to be original; we welcome high quality
contemporary papers published at other events.

 

PROCEEDINGS & JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE

An informal proceedings, including all accepted papers will be
distributed at the workshop. The best papers published at the workshop
will be invited to a special issue of the journal “Autonomous Agents &
Multi-Agent Systems” (Springer). We do not anticipate that the
acceptance of a paper at the MBC workshop will preclude submission to
other publication venues, although of course publication in the
journal special issue will exclude alternative publication.
CO-LOCATED WITH COMSOC 2008

The workshop will be held immediately before the Second Workshop on
Computational Social Choice Theory (COMSOC-2008), also being held at
the University of Liverpool:

   http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~pwg/COMSOC-2008/
  

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

* Peter McBurney
  Department of Computer Science
  University of Liverpool
  Liverpool L69 3BX UK
  mailto: mcburney [at] liverpool.ac.uk

* Enrico Gerding
  Department of EE&CS
  University of Southampton
  Southampton, UK

* Xin Yao
  School of Computer Science
  University of Birmingham, UK
PROVISIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)

* Andrew Byde (HP Labs, UK)
* Simon Case (BAE Systems, UK)
* Edith Elkind (Southampton, UK)
* Alessandro Farinelli (Southampton, UK)
* Nicholas R. Jennings (Southampton, UK)
* Xudong Luo (Birmingham, UK)
* Paul Marrow (BT, UK)
* Tomasz Michalak (Liverpool, UK)
* Simon Parsons (Brooklyn College, New York, USA)
* Adam Prugel-Bennett (Southampton, UK)
* Zinovi Rabinovich (Southampton, UK)
* Michael Wooldridge (Liverpool, UK)

—————————————————————-

Posted in Computer science, Conferences, Economic theory, Game theory, Mechanism design | Comments Off

Details of the FCC auctions start to emerge

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

Participants in the recent [tag]FCC[/tag] [tag]spectrum auctions[/tag] are now allowed to talk about what happened, and so some details are beginning to emerge.

Predictably, [tag]Verizon[/tag] released a rather dull statement saying that the new bandwidth it won

is a critical piece of its overall [tag]broadband[/tag] strategy to take advantage of the enormous opportunity for growth in data services in the future.

[tag]Google[/tag] has also been talking, basically admitting that they were acting rather like a shill (but in a good way)

to make sure that bidding on the so-called “C Block” reached the $4.6 billion reserve price that would trigger the important “open applications” and “open handsets” license conditions … in ten of the bidding rounds we actually raised our own bid — even though no one was bidding against us — to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block. In turn, that helped increase the revenues raised for the U.S. Treasury, while making sure that the openness conditions would be applied to the ultimate licensee.

Though the common reaction to this is “Yay Google, fighting for openness!”, I can’t help feeling that they have pretty concrete plans to benefit from the open applications side of things — I doubt they were taking a $4.6 billion bet (on someone raising them so they weren’t left winning) just so the great American consumer can use their favorite handset with Verizon.

The New York Times and the LA Times both have pieces on the these and other statements.

Posted in Economic theory, Marketing, Mechanism design, Telecommunications | Comments Off

Implications of the FCC spectrum auction: one view

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

Further to our post about the [tag]FCC[/tag] [tag]Spectrum auctions[/tag], legal scholar Susan Crawford has a commentary on the implications of the auction outcome for competition in the US broadband market.  Essentially, she argues that the failure of new, non-telco entrants to gain spectrum may delay the rise of innovative [tag]wireless broadband[/tag] services because it entrenches the walled-gardens model of traditional [tag]telecommunications[/tag] networks, rather than the open-access model of the Internet.  

Posted in Economic theory, Marketing, Mechanism design, Telecommunications | Comments Off

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