A Descriptive Auction Language

Electronic markets and especially online auctions gain more and more importance and a plethora of market mechanisms is emerging on the Internet. The great variety of trading rules hinders agents easily switching between different marketplaces and, therefore, fragments the overall market – supply and demand might fail to meet due to agents’ inability to interact with the same market mechanism. The problem can be overcome by a descriptive auction language (DAL) allowing for the machine-readable specification of arbitrary auction mechanisms. The implications are twofold: on the one hand a market engineer can coherently describe a mechanism by means of the language and automatically deploy it via an auction runtime environment and, on the other hand, a (software) agent can automatically deduce valid and reasonable actions from the description of a previously unknown auction mechanism.