TAC Market Design or CAT Tournament 2009

Last Updated:  2009-07-15.

News Flash: The final game of CAT 2009 was held yesterday, and on Bastille Day it was nice to the winning team came from France! The winners were:

First:  Jackaroo (ISL University of Western Sydney, Australia and IRIT University of Toulouse 1, France)

Second: CUNY.CS (City University of New York, USA)

Third:  IAMwildCAT (University of Southampton, UK)

Best Performance by a new entrant: CUNY.CS (City University of New York, USA)

Congratulations to the winners and to all the participating teams.  In 2009, there were 14 entries from teams in Australia/France, Canada, China, Croatia, Greece, Iran (2), Macau, Mexico, Taiwan, UK (2) and USA (2).

 

Introduction
The classic Trading-Agent Competition (TAC Classic) and the supply chain scenario (TAC SCM) were motivated by the desire to develop automated strategies for buyer and seller software agent in marketplaces. The trading rules or interaction mechanisms are fixed by the TAC Classic/TAC SCM organizers, and competition entrants compete with one another by creating agents that seek to trade under these fixed rules.

In contrast, the CAT Competition is the exact reverse of this: The software trading agents are created by the organizers of the competition, and as an entrant you will compete by defining rules for matching buyers and sellers and setting commission fees for prividing this service. Entrants compete against each other in attracting buyers and sellers and making profits. This is achieved by having effective matching rules and setting appropriate fees that are a good trade-off between making profit and attracting traders.

The Name
CAT is not only the reverse of TAC, but also refers to CATallactics, the science of exchanges.

The Aims of the Tournament
The objective of the Tournament is to encourage research in the design and application of computational market mechanisms, particularly mechanisms robust to and/or able to adapt automatically to changing environmental conditions.

 The goals of entrants (called specialists) to the Tournament are:

  • To design the market rules for effectively matching buyers and sellers given a dynamic set of traders.
  • To compete against other matchmakers (specialists) by attracting traders to your own market.
  • To maximise profits by setting appropriate commission fees.

The winner of the Tournament will be decided on the basis of multiple criteria, including profits, market share and transaction effectiveness.

Tournament Operation and Software
The CAT Tournament operates on a client-server basis with the server running a game platform called JCAT.    This software platform was developed by the CAT Tournament Team, building on the JASA (Java Auction Simulator API) double auction simulation platform developed originally at Liverpool by Dr Steve Phelps.

The traders (buyers and sellers) in the CAT marketplace all reside at the server, and are programmed by the Tournament organizers.  Entrants to the game create their own marketplace (called a specialist) which undertakes matchmaking of potential buyers and sellers locally — ie, at client-side.  The bids and asks from potential traders are communicated from the server to each specialist client over the Internet.  After matchmaking, each specialist client then communicates the results of matches back to the server.    

A client-server architecture was adopted to distribute processiong loads, and to minimize the possibility that mal-functioning or malicious specialists could disrupt game operations.

The 2009 CAT Game rules and operations will be very similar to those of the 2007 and 2008 Games.  Prior to the release of the final JCAT platform, feel free to download the previous version (currently version 0.12) and develop your specialist using this version.  Such specialists should not require much modification to work with the final 2009 JCAT platform version.

 

Timeline
The current schedule is as follows (revised 2009-07-03):

  • An API, other documentation and the current JCAT Tournament platform software are available at the sourceforge site given below.   A revised version (version 0.14) of the Tournament platform for 2009 is now available from sourceforge (see below for URL).
  • In April 2009, it was possible to register an expression of interest to participate in the 2009 Tournament. 
  • Entrants to the CAT Tournament also need to register through the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) system, here.  The deadline for registration was late May 2009.
  • Trials of the 2009 CAT Tournament were held during June 2009. The main purpose of the trial was to ensure that entrants are able to connect to the game server at Liverpool across the Internet and to participate successfully in the game.  
  • The finals of the 2009 CAT Tournament will run on the following dates:

         Game G1: Thursday 2009-07-09

         Game G2: Monday 2009-07-13

         Game G3:  Tuesday 2009-07-14

         The final games are held in conjunction with the other TAC games at IJCAI 2009. 

          Each game will commence at 1400 GMT (1500 BST, 0700 US Pacifiic Summer Time)

 

Assessment
Tournament entrants are assessed according to a multi-criteria scoring system.  The details of the assessment process are provided in the documents referenced and linked below, namely:  K. Cai et al. (2009):  Overview of CAT:  A Market Design Competition, version 2.0.

 

Further Information 
The documentation on the CAT Tournament, including the participant API and a version of the CAT tournament software platform, is available at the JCAT site at sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/jcat

Note that there are document files loaded there (in PDF), available for download from the box labelled “TAC Market Design Competition Platform”.  This documentation is still preliminary, and may be revised in the light of ongoing software development of the CAT tournament platform. 

Also, please note that the JCAT platform is currently undergoing minor modifications for the 2009 CAT Tournament, and modified versions of the platform will be uploaded to this sourceforge site in due course.  We have just uploaded version 0.14 to the site (effective 2009-07-02), and this version will be the one used for CAT 2009.

Revised documents describing the JCAT software platform and the operation of the 2009 CAT Tournament can be found here:

K. Cai, E. Gerding, P. McBurney, J. Niu, S. Parsons and S. Phelps [2009]: Overview of CAT: A Market Design Competition. Version 2.0.  Technical Report ULCS-09-005, Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.  

J. Niu, A. Mmoloke, P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2009]: CATP: A Communication Protocol for CAT Games Version 2.0.  Technical Report ULCS-09-012, Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.  

You should also consult the MBC Blog pages, for late-breaking information and revisions.  

Research Papers 
If you plan to participate in the 2009 CAT Tournament, you might also be interested in the following research papers, which have resulted from analyses of the 2007 and 2008 Tournament or from simulations using the JCAT Platform.  This research has been supported financially by the UK EPSRC, under grant GR/T10657/01 and associated grants.

  • J. Niu, K. Cai, S. Parsons, E. Gerding, P. McBurney, T. Moyaux, S. Phelps and D. Shield [2008]: JCAT: A platform for the TAC Market Design Competition. In: L. Padgham, D. Parkes, J. P. Mueller and S. Parsons (Editors): Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2008). Estoril, Portugal, May 2008. (PDF)
  • J. Niu, K. Cai, E. Gerding, P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2008]: Characterizing effective auction mechanisms: Insights from the 2007 TAC Market Design Competition. In: L. Padgham, D. Parkes, J. P. Mueller and S. Parsons (Editors): Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2008). Estoril, Portugal, May 2008. (PDF)
  • J. Niu, K. Cai, P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2008]: An analysis of entries in the first TAC Market Design Competition. In: L. Jain, B. Faltings, M. Gini and T. Terano (Editors): IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2008), Sydney, Australia, 2008. (PDF)
  • K. Cai, J. Niu and S. Parsons [2008]: On the economic effects of competition between double auction markets. Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2008). Estoril, Portugal, May 2008. (PDF)
  • M. L. Gruman and M. Narayana [2008]:  Applications of classifying bidding strategies for the CAT Tournament. Proceedings of the International Trading Agent Design and Analysis Workshop (TADA 2008).  Chicago, IL, USA, July 2008. (PDF)
  • A. Petric, V. Podobnik, A. Grguric and M. Zemljic [2008]:  Designing an effective e-market: an overview of the CAT agent. Proceedings of the International Trading Agent Design and Analysis Workshop (TADA 2008).  Chicago, IL, USA, July 2008. (PDF)
  • P. Vytelingum, I. A. Vetsikas, B. Shi  and N. R. Jennings  [2008]:  IAMwildCat: The winning strategy for the TAC market design competition. Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on AI (ECAI-2008). Patras, Greece, July 2008. (PDF)
  • J. Sohn, S. Lee and T. Mullen [2009]: Impact of misalignment of trading agent strategy under a multiple market. Proceedings of the Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA-2009). Boston, MA, USA, May 2009. (PDF) 
  • S. Honari, M. Ebadi, A. Foshati, M. Gomrokchi, J. Benatahr and B. Khosravifar [2009]: Price estimation of PersianCAT market equilibrium.  In:  E. Gerding (Editor):  Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2009), IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, CAI. (PDF)
  • E. R. Robinson, P. McBurney and X. Yao [2009] How specialised are specialists? Generalisation properties of entries from the 2008 TAC Market Design Competition. In:  E. Gerding (Editor):  Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2009), IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, CAI. (PDF)
  • J. Sohn, S. Lee and T. Mullen [2009]: Attracting intra-marginal traders across multiple markets. In:  E. Gerding (Editor):  Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2009), IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, CAI. (PDF)
  • L. C. Stavrogiannis and P. A. Mitkas [2009]: CAT 2008 post-tournament evaluation: The Mertacor’s perspective. In:  E. Gerding (Editor):  Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2009), IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, CAI. (PDF)

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    In particular, we welcome information about any other published research arising from the CAT Tournaments or which uses the JCAT platform.  

    We also recommend that you attend the 2009 Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2009) Workshop, which will host the finals of the 2009 CAT Tournament, along with the other TAC Tournaments.   
     

    Specialists from the 2007 and 2008 CAT Tournaments
    Because TAC games are run to promote research, entrants to the TAC games are requested to upload their entries to the TAC Agent Repository following each tournament.  Many of the 2007 and 2008 CAT Tournament entries can be found at the TAC Agent Repository (scroll down).  

    Contact
    If you have any questions or comments, please contact CAT Tournament GameMaster for 2009:

    Peter McBurney (email:  mcburney [at] liverpool.ac.uk)

    Collaboration and Sponsors
    The CAT Tournament is a collaborative effort between the University of Liverpool (Department of Computer Science), Brooklyn College (Department of Computer and Information Science), and the University of Southampton (School of Electronics and Computer Science).  The Tournament is proudly sponsored by the MBC Project, a major research project funded by the UK EPSRC as part of a research program to manage the complexity of computational systems by means of novel paradigms from other disciplines.

    CAT Tournament Team:

    Peter McBurney, University of Liverpool, UK
    Dave Shield, University of Liverpool, UK
    Enrico Gerding, University of Southampton, UK
    Simon Parsons, Brooklyn College, CUNY, New York, USA
    Jinzhong Niu, Brooklyn College, CUNY, New York, USA 
    Kai Cai, Brooklyn College, CUNY, New York, USA
    Dan Cartwright, University of Liverpool, UK
    Steve Phelps, University of Essex, UK. 

     

     

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