Designing an Effective E-Market: An Overview of the CAT Agent

Markets are complex economic systems that function as intermediaries between consumers and providers. Traditional methods for studying market mechanisms, utilized by economists and mathematicians, use analytical approaches. Today, the rapid proliferation of the Internet is stimulating the transformation of classical markets into electronic markets (e-markets). Traditional theories cannot adequately cover the dynamics of complex computing systems, such as the e-market, creating the need for new methods. Consequently, computing scientists and experts have joined their efforts with economists and mathematicians to create a novel approach for modeling and evaluating market processes, referred to as agent-based computational economics. The Trading Agent Competition Mechanism Design Tournament, also known as the CAT Tournament, is one of latest efforts in that direction. In the CAT Tournament, trading agents are created by the organizers of the competition and entrants compete by defining market rules. In this paper, a description of the CAT Tournament is given, followed by a look at the main features of our entrant for 2007, the CrocodileAgent.