Trading Agents Competing: Performance, Progress, and Market Effectiveness

Since the year 2000, the annual trading agent competition has provided a forum for designers to evaluate programmed trading techniques in a challenging market scenario in competition with other design groups. After three years of apparent progress, we attempt to evaluate the trading competence of competition participants, in the 2002 tournament and over time. Although absolute measure of individual performance is difficult to assess, relative measures, and measures of the market performance overall are more amenable to direct analysis. We quantify the effectiveness of the TAC travel market in terms of allocative efficiency, finding improvement within and between tournaments. By comparison with alternative allocation benchmarks, we can calibrate this efficiency, and identify opportunities for further gain from trade.