A Practical Approach for Researching Trading Agents’ Behaviour in a CDA Environment1

During the last decade, there has been a huge increase in the volume of Internet business transactions which in turn led to the emergence of a new field of scientific research ­ agent­based computational economics. In order to be able to conduct successful transactions, agents must have appropriate strategies to participate in trading negotiations. This paper is aimed at investigating the process of multi­agent negotiations in continuous double auction (CDA) and describes one possible approach for solving the problem of resource allocation in a distributed computational environment. Our goal is to present a new software tool for e­auctions simulation and to investigate bidding agents’ strategies. Via a series of experiments we prove that this new software application sufficiently models the process of making transactions in CDA. We propose a new method for quick and reliable strategy comparisons. Using this novel method, we can choose a bidding strategy that ensures the most effective resource allocation.