This paper presents a software bidding agent that inserts fake bids on the seller’s behalf to inflate an auction’s price. This behaviour is referred to as shill bidding. Shill bidding is strictly prohibited by online auctioneers, as it defrauds unsuspecting buyers by forcing them to pay more for the item. The malicious bidding agent was constructed to aid in developing shill detection technique...

We analyze symmetric pure strategy equilibria in dynamic sponsored search auction games using simulations, restricting the strategies to several in a class of greedy bidding strategies introduced by Cary et al. We show that a particular convergent strategy, “balanced bidding”, also exhibits high stability to deviations in the dynamic setting. On the other hand, a cooperative strategy which yiel...

Collusion between suppliers in reverse auctions may damage buyers’ benifits and then lower efficiency of resource allocation. Under first-price sealed-bid reverse auction mechanism, suppliers' equilibrium bidding strategy and buyers' revenue loss was analyzed considering collusion. Then some general conclusions were given: suppliers' bidding strategy is relevant to some factors such as valuatio...

We describe two strategies for bidding on customer RFQs in the Supply Chain Management Trading Agent Competition. The first strategy, used by Botticelli in previous years, is to model and solve the problem as integer linear program. The second strategy is a greedy algorithm where customer demand is scheduled according to the predicted marginal profit. Both strategies have been implemented in th...

Online auction buyers often face the predicament of choosing between the buyout strategy and the bidding strategy to acquire an auctioned product. A buyer who chooses to buy out will obtain the item immediately at the posted price while the one who chooses to bid will have to monitor the bidding process in the hope of acquiring the product at a price lower than the posted one. Despite the wealt...

Group-buying ads seeking a minimum number of customers before the deal expiry are increasingly used by the daily-deal providers. Unlike the traditional web ads, the advertiser’s profits for group-buying ads depends on the time to expiry and additional customers needed to satisfy the minimum group size. Since both these quantities are time-dependent, optimal bid amounts to maximize profits chang...

This study is the first to attempt to isolate a relationship between cognitive activity and equilibration to a Nash Equilibrium. Subjects, while undergoing fMRI scans of brain activity, participated in second price auctions against a single competitor following predetermined strategy that was unknown to the subject. For this auction there is a unique strategy that will maximize the subjects’ ea...

Cloud computing has been an emerging model which aims at allowing customers to utilize computing resources hosted by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). More and more consumers rely on CSPs to supply computing and storage service on the one hand, and CSPs try to attract consumers on favorable terms on the other. In such competitive cloud computing markets, pricing policies are critical to market ef...

Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with various strategic problems, depending on preference structure. As long as bids represent non-repudiable offers, submitting non-contingent bids to separate auctions entails an exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. With multiple goods (or units of a homogeneous good) bi...

Bidding for multi-items in simultaneous auctions raises challenging problems. In multi-auction settings, the determination of optimal bids by potential buyers requires combinatorial calculations. While an optimal bidding strategy is known when bidding in sequential auctions, only suboptimal strategies are available when bidding for items being sold in simultaneous auctions. We investigate a mul...