The TADA/AMEC joint workshop at AAMAS 2006
Trading Agent Design and Analysis & Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce VIII

Hakodate Japan, May 9 2006

A workshop held in conjunction with the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Description

The design and analysis of trading agents and electronic trading systems in which they are deployed involves finding solutions to a diverse set of problems, involving individual behaviors, interaction, and colective behavior in the context of trade. A wide variety of trading scenarios and systems, and agent approaches to these, have been studied in recent years. These studies suggest models that support the design and the analysis at the level of the single trading agent and at the level of the multi-agent system.

This workshop will address both the agent level and the system level, combining desing and analysis aspects of electronic trade. The primary goal of this workshop is to continue to bring together novel work from diverse fields as Computer Science, Operations Research, Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems that focus on modeling, implementation and evaluation of computational trading agents and institutions.

TADA/AMEC VIII was co-located with the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'06) and it built on the success of previous workshops of the AMEC and TADA series. 

Topics of interest

All topics related to agents and e-business are welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Distributed (scalable) algorithmic mechanism design

• Mechanisms for unreliable, dynamic and asynchronous environments

• Mechanisms for incomplete and/or imperfect information environments

• Mechanisms for information goods and services

• Mechanisms for security, privacy, accounting, verification and auditing

• Distributed (agent and mechanism) learning models

• Agents strategies in multi-institutional environments

• Economic and game theoretic specification, design and analysis

• Bargaining, voting and auction mechanisms

• Distributed reputation and trusted mechanisms

• User-Agent interface design

• Agents that support bidding and negotiation

• Empirical evaluation of human-agent trading

• Eliciting human preferences and requirements

• Simulation and evaluation of properties of novel and complex mechanisms

• Goods, services, and contract description languages

• Mechanism description, verification and testing languages

• Agent mediated electronic system architectures and design principles

• Implemented agent-mediated electronic-commerce systems

• Mechanisms for business (supply chains, coalitions, and virtual enterprises)

• Mechanisms for Internet (Congestion, Routing, Overlay, Peer-to-Peer, ad-hoc networks)

• Mechanisms for novel applications 

Proceedings

A collection of selected and revised papers from the workshop are available as Springer Verlag LNAI Volume 4452.

Program

Regular papers

Each regular paper was allocated 25 minutes (including questions) for presentation at the workshop. The program is available below.

Poster papers

Poster papers were presented as posters.

Session 1: Trading Agents (09:15-10:30) 

1. Market Efficiency, Sales Competition, and the Bullwhip Effect in the TAC SCM Tournaments.

Patrick R. Jordan, Christopher Kiekintveld, Jason Miller and Michael P. Wellman

2. TacTex-05: An Adaptive Agent for TAC SCM.

David Pardoe, Peter Stone and Mark VanMiddlesworth

3. TAC-REM – The Real Estate Market Game: A Proposal for the Trading Agent Competition.

Scott Buffett and Maria Fasli

Session 2:  Negotiation and Elections (11:00-12:40)

4. Multi-Winner Elections: Complexity of Manipulation, Control and Winner-Determination.

Ariel D. Procaccia, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein and Aviv Zohar

5. On Efficient Procedures for Multi-Issue Negotiation.

Shaheen S. Fatima, Michael Wooldridge and Nicholas R. Jennings

6. Agent Compatibility and Coalition Formation: Investigating Two Interacting Negotiation Strategies.

Carlos Merida-Campos and Steven Willmott

7. A Fast Method for Learning Non-linear Preferences Online Using Anonymous Negotiation Data.

D. J. A. Somefun and J. A.. La Poutre

Session 3:  Markets and Auctions (14:00-15:40)

8. Evolutionary Optimization of ZIP60: A Controlled Explosion in Hyperspace.

Dave Cliff

9. Learning Market Prices for a Real-time Supply Chain Management Trading Agent.

David A. Burke, Kenneth N. Brown, S. Armagan Tarim and Brahim Hnich                            

10. Savings in Combinatorial Auctions through Transformation Relationships.

Andrea Giovannucci, Jesus Cerquides and Juan A. Rodriguez-Aguilar                                   

11. Evolutionary Stability of Behavioural Types in the Continuous Double Auction.

Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Dave Cliff and Nicholas R. Jennings

Session 4:  Markets and Auctions (16:00-17:30)

12. Gossip-Based Aggregation of Trust in Decentralized Reputation Systems.

Ariel D. Procaccia, Yoram Bachrach and Jeffrey S. Rosenschein                                            

13. Pride and Perjury: A Computational Characterization of Multiagent Games with Fallacious Rewards

Ariel D, Procaccia and Jeffrey S. Rosenschein                                                                         

Discussion and closing

Posters

TAC SCM Pricing as a Continuous Knapsack Problem

Michael Benisch, James Andrews and Norman Sadeh

Agents’ Bidding Strategies in a Combinatorial Auction Controlled Grid Environment

Michael Schwind, Tim Stockheim and Oleg Gujo

A Comparative Study of Sequential and Simultaneous Auctions

Shaheen S. Fatima

A Market-Pressure-Based Performance Evaluator for TAC-SCM

Brett Borghetti, Eric Sodomka, Maria Gini, and John Collins

Competing Sellers in Online Markets: Reserve Prices, Shill Bidding, and Auction Fees

Enrico H. Gerding, Alex Rogers, Rajdeep K. Dash and Nicholas R. Jennings

Designing Incentive-Compatible Feedback Payment Schemes

Radu Jurca and Boi Faltings

The CrocodileAgent: Analysis and Comparison with Other TAC SCM 2005 Agents

Ana Petric, Vedran Podobnik and Gordan Jezic

Robust Mechanisms for Information Elicitation

Aviv Zohar and Jeffrey S. Rosenschein

A Fuzzy Constraint Based Model for Automated Purchase Negotiations

Miguel A. LÙpez-Carmona and Juan R. Velasco

Organizers

TADA Chair: Maria Fasli, University of Essex, UK
AMEC Chair: Onn Shehory, IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel
Event General Chair: Amy Greenwald, Brown University, USA
Operations: Joakim Eriksson, SICS, Sweden
SCM GameMaster: John Collins, University of Minnesota, USA
Travel GameMaster: Alberto Sardinha, ScD - Computer Science - PUC-Rio, Brazil
Finance: Peter Wurman, North Carolina State University, USA
Publicity: Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Local Arrangements Chair: Shihomi Wada, FUN, Japan

Program Committee

Chris Brooks, University of San Francisco, USA

Dave Cliff, University of Southampton/Syritta Algorithmics  

John Collins, University of Minnesota, USA

Marc Esteva, IIIA-CSIC, Spain

Boi Faltings, EPFL, CH

Shaheen Fatima, Liverpool University, UK

Amy Greenwald, Brown University, USA

Minhua He, University of Southampton

Sverker Janson, SICS, Sweden

Wolf Ketter, University of Minnesota, USA

Kate Larson, University of Waterloo, CA

Kevin Leyton-Brown, University of British Columbia, CA

Tracy Mullen, Penn State University, USA

Julian Padget, University of Bath, UK

David Pardoe, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Sun Park, Yonsei University, Korea

Simon Parsons, Brooklyn College, USA

Han La Poutre, CWI, Netherlands

Jeff Rosenschein, Hebrew University, Israel

Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Alberto Sardinha, ScD - Computer Science - PUC-Rio, Brazil

Carles Sierra, IIIA, Spain

Peter Stone, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Ioannis Vetsikas, University of Southampton, UK

Michael Wellman, University of Michigan, USA

Steven Willmott, UPC, Spain

Dongmo Zhang, University of Western Sydney, Australia

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