Evolution of Realistic Hybrid Auctions

Auctions are an important class of mechanisms for resolving multi-agent allocation problems. A genetic algorithm (GA) can be used to design auction mechanisms in order to automatically generate a desired market mechanism in an agent based E-market. One study found a new hybrid market mechanism never be found in the real-world which has very desirable market dynamics according to a measure based on Smith’s coefficient of convergence. However, the auction space used in that study do not contain realistic single sided auctions. In this paper, a more realistic auction space is proposed and explored by a simple GA. The hybrid market mechanism still can be found that shows the hybrid market mechanism is not an artifact because an unfaithful auction space had been used in previous experiments.