Auctions and Multi-agent Systems

Summary

In an auction house, buyers and sellers coordinate so as to exchange goods following a highly structured and apparently simple procedure. These coordination conventions have evolved through the years, and are currently used in commercial institutions for exchanging diverse goods and services. In this chapter we take as an instance a traditional auction house, the Llotja (a fish market) of Blanes, and we discuss how a virtual and adaptable electronic fish market can be derived from it. In this virtual institution the mediating functions are performed by autonomous agents, and customers or vendors can be either individuals or software agents. We also show how the underlying notions can be applied to define other institutions where the participants can be software agents.

Part of this work was done while at the Computer Science Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland.