Designing and Implementing Electronic Auctions in a Multiagent System Environment

Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce is gaining a wide consensus both from the academia and from the industry, since it provides the right abstractions, models and tools to face the challenges that electronic commerce raises. According to C.Sierra, e-commerce can be described as organization + mechanism + trust, where mechanism is concerned with the rules that govern the interaction among agents in such a way that certain properties can be guaranteed. This paper describes the design and implementation of a library of customizable agents for simulating auction mechanisms. The purpose of the library is to provide a support to the correct engineering of mechanisms in the e-commerce setting, by providing a flexible tool for the quick prototyping of realistic auctions to the auctions’ developers. The auction mechanisms that are included in our library respect the Revenue Equivalence Theorem, one of the most important theorems of the formal theory of auctions.