Self-Enforcing Strategic Demand Reduction

Auctions are an area of great academic and commercial interest, from tiny auctions for toys on eBay to multi-billion-dollar auctions held by governments for resources or contracts. Although there has been significant research on auction theory, especially from the perspective of auction mechanisms, studies of autonomous bidding agents and their interactions are relatively few and recent. This paper examines several autonomous agent bidding strategies in the context of FAucS, a faithful simulation of a complex FCC spectrum auction. We introduce punishing randomized strategic demand reduction (PRSDR), a novel bidding strategy by which bidders can partition available goods in a mutually beneficial way without explicit inter-agent communication. When all use PRSDR, bidders obtain significantly better results than when using a reasonable baseline approach. The strategy automatically detects and punishes non-cooperating bidders to achieve robustness in the face of agent defection, and performs well under alternative conditions. The PRSDR strategy is fully implemented and we present detailed empirical results.