Adaptive soft bid determination in bidding strategies for continuous double auctions

Abstract

There are several bidding strategies proposed in the literature for agents in continuous double auctions (CDAs). For most bidding strategies, the asks or bids determined are hard and cannot be compromised. However, for human traders, we notice that the decisions are usually soft and adaptive in different situations. Therefore, we believe that integrating softness and adaptivity into the bidding strategies can enhance the performance of agents. Experimental results confirm that when agents using different bidding strategies make adaptive and soft compromise in various situations, their performance is improved significantly in general. In order to guide agents to adopt soft asks or bids in dynamic and unknown markets, an adaptive mechanism is proposed to adjust the degree of softness of soft asks or bids according to the realtime market context. Experiments results show that agents adopting the adaptive mechanism generally outperform the corresponding agents without the adaptive mechanism.