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Adaptive mechanism design: a metalearning approach

Published: 13 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Auction mechanism design has traditionally been a largely analytic process, relying on assumptions such as fully rational bidders. In practice, however, bidders often exhibit unknown and variable behavior, making them difficult to model and complicating the design process. To address this challenge, we explore the use of an adaptive auction mechanism: one that learns to adjust its parameters in response to past empirical bidder behavior so as to maximize an objective function such as auctioneer revenue. In this paper, we give an overview of our general approach and then present an instantiation in a specific auction scenario. In addition, we show how predictions of possible bidder behavior can be incorporated into the adaptive mechanism through a metalearning process. The approach is fully implemented and tested. Results indicate that the adaptive mechanism is able to outperform any single fixed mechanism, and that the addition of metalearning improves performance substantially.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICEC '06: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce: The new e-commerce: innovations for conquering current barriers, obstacles and limitations to conducting successful business on the internet
    August 2006
    624 pages
    ISBN:1595933921
    DOI:10.1145/1151454
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 13 August 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. auctions
    2. machine learning
    3. mechanism design
    4. metalearning

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    ICEC '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 112 submissions, 47%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%

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