CS395T: Agent-Based Electronic Commerce -- Fall 2006: Assignments Page

Assignments for Agent-Based Electronic Commerce (cs395t)

Week 1 (8/31): Introduction

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  • For each class (after the first), be sure to submit a question or comment about the reading by 10pm on the day before class as an email in plain ascii text. I prefer that is be sent in the body of the email, rather than as an attachment. Please use the subject line "class readings for [due date]" and send to Peter and David (pstone@cs and dpardoe@cs). Please include your name in the response. And if you refer explicitly to the reading, please include page numbers.

    • Week 2 (9/5,7): Auction theory

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  • Auction Theory: A Guide to the Literature, pages 1-46 and the afterword. (Due Tuesday)
    Paul Klemperer.
    Journal of Economic Surveys, 13(3), July 1999, pp. 227-286.
    Please read pages 1-46 (which includes Appendix A).
    Important note: This is a survey article. I don't expect you to fully understand the technical details of all the stated results. More important is to understand the parameters that go into the analysis of an auction (e.g. risk attitude of sellers and buyers, private vs. common values, etc.) and how they can impact this analysis. The one exception is that you should thoroughly understand the revenue equivalence theorem (Appendix A).

  • Auctions and Bidding: A Primer. (Due Thursday)
    Paul Milgrom.
    The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 3, No. 3. (Summer, 1989), pp. 3-22.
    Note: The above link works from UTCS machines, but may not work from an off-campus computer.
    From outside UTCS, try this link.

    • Week 3 (9/12,14): Game theory and mechanism design

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  • An Introduction to Game Theory. (Due Tuesday)
    Martin J. Osborne.
    Oxford University Press, 2002.
    Please read Chapters 1 and 2 and Section 3.5.
    This is a long, but important reading. Especially if you're not familiar with game theory, leave yourself plenty of time.
    If you're understanding things well, you don't have to go through all the examples, but do make sure you catch all the concepts.

  • Classic Mechanism Design. (Due Thursday)
    David Parkes.
    Chapter 2 of his dissertation.
    You can accelerate through sections 2.5 and 2.6, but do try to get a sense of the kinds of things that can be shown, even if you don't focus on the details of what's actually known to be possible and impossible.

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    Week 4 (9/19,21): TAC Travel

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  • Chapters 1 and 2 of the draft book Autonomous Bidding Agents by Wellman, Greenwald and Stone. (Due Tuesday)
    Available on UTCS machines from /u/pstone/temp/ch1-3.pdf.

  • Chapter 3. (Due Thursday)

    • Week 5 (9/26,28): TAC SCM

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  • TAC Supply Chain Management Specification. (due Tuesday)
    The TAC team.
    From the SICS TAC page (or go to the main page).

  • Christopher Kiekintveld, Jason Miller, Patrick Jordan, and Michael P. Wellman. Controlling a supply chain agent using value-based decomposition. Seventh ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Ann Arbor, MI, 2006.(due Tuesday)

  • Minghua He, Alex Rogers, Xudong Luo, and Nicholas R. Jennings. Designing a successful trading agent for supply chain management. Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 1159-1166. Hakodate, Japan, 2006. (due Thursday)

  • David Pardoe and Peter Stone. TacTex-05: A Champion Supply Chain Management Agent. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 2006. PDF  PS (due Thursday)
  • Or, a more detailed version:
    David Pardoe and Peter Stone. Predictive Planning for Supply Chain Management. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, June 2006. PDF  PS 

    • Week 6 (10/3,10/5): Automated Mechanism Design and CAT

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  • Automated Mechanism Design. (due Tuesday).
    Tuomas Sandholm.

  • (tentative) A proposal for a game on Market Design by Gerding et al. (Due Thursday)
    Available on UTCS machines from /u/pstone/temp/MarketDesign.pdf.

  • Come to class on Thursday prepared to discuss preferences for the programming project.

    • Week 7 (10/10,10/12): The Penn-Lehman Automated Trading Project (PLAT)

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  • The Penn-Lehman Automated Trading Project. (due Tuesday)
    Michael Kearns and Luis Ortiz.
    From The PLAT page.

  • Three papers on agents for PLAT: 1 2 3
    Read the abstracts for all three, and choose one to read entirely. (Due Thursday)

    • Week 8 (10/17,10/19): FCC spectrum auctions

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  • Spectrum Auctions. (due Tuesday)
    Peter Cramton.
    in Martin Cave, Sumit Majumdar, and Ingo Vogelsang, eds., Handbook of Telecommunications Economics, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science B.V., Chapter 14, 605-639, 2002.

  • Selling Spectrum Rights. (Optional for Tuesday)
    John McMillan.
    Journal of Economic Perspectives, 8(3):145-162, 1994.
    This one doesn't cover the results of the auctions (since it was written in 1994, before they happened). But it has some interesting additional details about the design process.

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  • Making More from Less: Strategic Demand Reduction in the FCC Spectrum Auctions. (due Thursday)
    Robert J. Weber.
    The Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 6(3), 1997.
    Note: The above link works from UTCS machines, but may not work from an off-campus computer.

  • Self-Enforcing Strategic Demand Reduction. (due Thursday)
    Paul S.A. Reitsma, Peter Stone, Ja'nos A. Csirik, and Michael L. Littman.
    in Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce IV. Designing Mechanisms and Systems: AAMAS2002 Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce Bologna, Italy, July 16, 2002. Revised Papers. Pages 289-306.
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    Week 9 (10/24,26): General equilibrium theory

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  • Section 5.6 of Distributed Rational Decision Making. (Due Tuesday)
    Tuomas Sandholm.
    In the textbook Multiagent Systems: A Modern Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Weiss, G., ed., MIT Press. p. 201-258.
    Just Section 5.6 on General Equilibrium (and focus on 5.6.1 and 5.6.2): (p. 34-43 in the version linked above)

  • A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems. (Due Tuesday)
    Michael Wellman.
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume 1, 193, pages 1-23.

  • Chapter 4 of the draft book Autonomous Bidding Agents by Wellman, Greenwald and Stone. (Due Thursday)
    Available on UTCS machines from /u/pstone/temp/ch4.pdf.
    Focus especially on the use of "Competitive Equilibrium Analysis" in Section 4.4

    • Week 10 (10/31,11/2): Minority Games

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  • The El Farol Bar Problem (Due Tuesday )
    By Brian Arthur (1994). American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings), 84,406-411, 1994.
    PDF version

  • Adaptive Learning and Emergent Coordination in Minority Games (Due Tuesday)
    G. Bottazzi, G. Devetag, G. Dosi, S. Anna (2001).
    PS.GZ version

    • Week 11 (11/7,9): Preference Elicitation, CDA bidding strategies

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  • Effectiveness of preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions, extended version.(Due Tuesday)
    Benoit Hudson and Tuomas Sandholm.
    In AAMAS-02 workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC), Bologna, Italy, 2002.

  • High-Performance Bidding Agents for the Continuous Double Auction. (Due Thursday)
    Gerald Tesauro and Rajarshi Das
    In Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pages 206-209, 2001.
    Try here if that link doesn't work.
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    Week 12 (11/14,16): Reputation

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  • The Market for Evaluations. (due Tuesday)
    Christopher Avery, Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser.
    American Economic Review 89(3):564-584, 1999
    Note: The above link works from UTCS machines, but may not work from an off-campus computer.
    From outside UTCS, try this link.

  • Learning Trust Strategies in Reputation Exchange Networks. (due Thursday)
    Fullam, K. and K.S. Barber. (2006)
    The Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2006), Hakodate, Japan, May 8-12, pp. 1241-1248.

    • Week 13 (11/21): Coalitions

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  • Chapter 11 of the draft book Multi Agent Systems by Shoham and Leyton-Brown. (Due Tuesday)
    Available on UTCS machines from /u/pstone/temp/shoham-ch11.pdf.
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    Week 14 (11/28,11/30): Human bidding empirical analysis

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  • Last-Minute Bidding and the Rules for Ending Second-Price Auctions: Evidence from eBay and Amazon on the Internet. (due Tuesday)
    Alvin E. Roth and Axel Ockenfels.
    American Economic Review, vol. 92, issue 4, pages 1093-1103, 2002.

  • Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias. (due Tuesday)
    Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler.
    The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 1, (Winter, 1991), 193-206.
    Note: The above link works from UTCS machines, but may not work from an off-campus computer.

  • Agent-Human Interactions in the Continuous Double Auction. (due Thursday)
    Rajarshi Das, James E. Hanson, Jeffrey O. Kephart and Gerald Tesauro.
    IJCAI 2001.

    • Week 15 (12/5,7): Tournament(s) project reports

    (resources)
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