Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2001. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 115 p.; also contains graphics. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation examines an iterative multi-attribute auction for multi-unit procurement in the first part. A multi-unit allocation problem that allows order split among suppliers is formulated to improve the market efficiency. Suppliers are allowed to provide discriminative prices over units based on their marginal costs. A mechanism called Iterative Multiple-attribute Multiple-unit Reverse Auction (IMMRA) is proposed based on the assumption of the modified myopic best-response strategies. Numerical experiment results show that the IMMRA achieves market efficiency in most instances. The inefficiency occurs occasionally on the special cases when cost structures are significantly different among suppliers. Numerical results also show that the IMMRA results in lower buyer payments than the Vickrey-Clarke-Grove (VCG) payments in most cases. In the second part, two sequential auctions with the Vickrey-Clarke-Grove (VCG) mechanism are proposed for two buyers to purchase multiple units of an identical item. The invited suppliers are assumed to have capacity constraints of providing the required demands. Three research problems are raised for the analysis of the sequential auctions: the suppliers' expected payoff functions, the suppliers' bidding strategies in the first auction, and the buyers' procurement costs. Because of the intrinsic complexity of the problems, we limit our study to a duopoly market environment with two suppliers. Both suppliers’ dominant bidding strategies are theoretically derived. With numerical experiments, suppliers’ expected profits and buyers’ expected procurement costs are empirically analyzed.

Continuous Double Auction (CDA) is an efficient market institution for real-world trading. Negotiation capabilities for software agents are a central concern. Specially, agents need to be able to prepare bids for and evaluate offers on behalf of the users they represent with the aim of obtaining the maximum benefit for their users. They do this according to some bidding strategies. However, in many cases, on one hand, determining which strategy to employ is a complex decision making task because of the inherent uncertainty and dynamics of the auction market; on the other hand, strategies in the literature do not adapt very well to the dynamic markets. To this end, this thesis is concerned with developing novel bidding strategies for CDAs and enhancing the performance of different strategies in CDAs with respect to adaptivity by designing some generally used tools. / In this thesis, we focus on two types of CDAs. One is the CDAs with a deadline of inactive interval. Another is the CDAs with a fixed deadline. Three kinds of adaptive behaviors are proposed to enhance the performance of the widely adopted strategies in CDAs in the literature. They are adaptive softness, adaptive judgment of price acceptability, and adaptive time strategies. First, in the CDAs with a deadline of inactive interval, we design novel adaptive strategies, named Adaptive Attitude strategies, based on eagerness. Eagerness indicates the current supply and demand relationship from the agent's own point of view. To compute the value of eagerness, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic are used to cope with the significant degrees of uncertainty in CDA markets. We define two kinds of adaptive behaviors, adaptive softness and adaptive judgment of price acceptability. Both of them resemble human traders' behaviors to compromise and set thresholds on acceptable prices in the trading process of real life markets and can enhance the performance of various strategies. Secondly, in the CDAs with a fixed deadline, time strategies are researched by us. In this market, every agent is aware of the time. Therefore adaptive time strategies are introduced to guide the agent to arrange his behavior according to time, which can enhance the performance of different strategies. Both the novel strategies and the enhanced strategies have been demonstrated to be superior in a wide range of CDA circumstances. We show that eagerness is a, practical solution for this class of application. We believe that this work represents an important step towards adapting agents in auctions. / Through the work in this thesis, Adaptive Attitude (AA) strategies have been demonstrated to be superior in a wide range of CDA scenarios. Moreover, three kinds of adaptive behaviors have been shown to greatly enhance the performance of the widely adopted strategies in CDAs. / Ma Huiye. / "August 2006." / Adviser: Ho Fung Leung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: B, page: 1731. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-162). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Sui, Xin. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-97). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- MAS-Based Resource Allocation Problems --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Combinatorial Auction As a Solution --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3 --- Strategy Issues --- p.5 / Chapter 1.4 --- Structure of This Work --- p.7 / Chapter 2 --- Combinatorial Auctions and Bidding Strategies --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1 --- Combinatorial Auctions for Resource Allocation --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Bidding Strategies in Combinatorial Auctions --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Berhault's Strategies --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- An's Strategies --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Schwind´ةs Strategies --- p.15 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Wilenius´ةs Strategy --- p.17 / Chapter 2.2.5 --- Overview of Previous Strategies --- p.18 / Chapter 3 --- An Adaptive Bidding Strategy in Static Markets --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- Basic Concepts --- p.22 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Core Algorithm --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3 --- Experimental Evaluation --- p.31 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Experiment Setup --- p.32 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Experiment Results and Analysis --- p.33 / Chapter 4 --- An Adaptive Bidding Strategy in Dynamic Markets --- p.38 / Chapter 4.1 --- Basic Concepts --- p.39 / Chapter 4.2 --- The Core Algorithm --- p.42 / Chapter 4.3 --- Experimental Evaluation --- p.48 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Experiment Setup --- p.49 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Experiment Results and Analysis --- p.51 / Chapter 5 --- A Q-Learning Based Adaptive Bidding Strategy in Static Mar-kets --- p.59 / Chapter 5.1 --- An Overview of Q-Learning --- p.60 / Chapter 5.2 --- Basic Concepts --- p.63 / Chapter 5.3 --- The Core Algorithm --- p.65 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Evaluation --- p.70 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Experiment Setup --- p.70 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Experiment Results and Analysis --- p.72 / Chapter 6 --- Discussion --- p.82 / Chapter 6.1 --- Applicability of the Adaptive Strategies --- p.82 / Chapter 6.2 --- Generalization of the Adaptive Strategies --- p.83 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.86 / Chapter 7.1 --- Conclusion --- p.86 / Chapter 7.2 --- Future Work --- p.88 / Bibliography --- p.91

The United States Army is increasing its force by 65,000 troops over the next few years. Included in this increase are Army aviators. Retention of the current soldiers in uniform is becoming very difficult as the deployment schedule of the current Global War on Terrorism wears down the individual aviator. Army Aviation is included in this build up of forces, yet it must also compete with the amount of jobs becoming available as the baby boomer generation retires and leaves gaps in both the civilian pilot workforce for commercial airlines and also the United States Customs air inventory. This thesis will explore the Aviation Incentive program from its outset. It will then continue with a discussion of Auctions and Auction Theory. It will conclude with a game theory approach and other mathematical approaches on bidding in auctions. Combining Auction Theory with the mathematical approach provides the bidder in an auction a more educated decision in their bidding strategy. Utilizing Auctions for Aviator retention allows the Army to be more flexible in determining a value for a bonus rather than limited by the offer of a static amount which may or may not help with retention. / US Army (USA) author.

The goal of this thesis is to propose a new quantile regression approach to identify and estimate the quantiles of the private value conditional distribution in ascending and rst price auctions under the Independent Private Value (IPV) paradigm. The quantile regression framework provides a exible and convenient parametrization of the private value distribution, which is not a ected by the curse of dimensionality. The rst Chapter of the thesis introduces a quantile regression methodology for ascending auctions. The Chapter focuses on revenue analysis, optimal reservation price and its associated screening level. An empirical application for the USFS timber auctions suggests an optimal reservation price policy with a probability of selling the good as low as 58% for some auctions with two bidders. The second Chapter tries to address this issue by considering a risk averse seller with a CRRA utility function. A numerical exercise based on the USFS timber auctions shows that increasing the CRRA of the sellers is su cient to give more reasonable policy recommendations and a higher probability of selling the auctioned timber lot. The third Chapter develops a quantile regression methodology for rst-price auction. The estimation method combines local polynomial, quantile regression and additive sieve methods. It is shown in addition that the new quantile regression methodology is not subject to boundary issues. The choice of smoothing parameters is also discussed.

Chan Yiu Wing. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-44). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.11 / 摘要 --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Reviews of Existing Models --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Second Price Sealed-bid Auction --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2 --- First Price Sealed-bid Auction --- p.6 / Chapter 2.3 --- Revenue Equivalence Principle --- p.6 / Chapter 2.4 --- Risk-Averse Bidders --- p.7 / Chapter 2.5 --- Budget Constraints --- p.7 / Chapter 2.6 --- Budget-Constrained Sequential Auction with --- p.9 / Chapter Chapter 3. --- The Model --- p.11 / Chapter 3.1 --- Model´ةs Background --- p.11 / Chapter 3.2 --- Auction´ة s Rules… --- p.13 / Chapter 3.3 --- Critical Values --- p.17 / Chapter 3.4 --- Revenues of the Sequential Auction --- p.18 / Chapter 3.5 --- Results --- p.19 / Chapter Chapter 4. --- More General Cases --- p.28 / Chapter 4.1 --- A possibility of winning both goods by a bidder --- p.28 / Chapter 4.2 --- The winning bid of the first stage auction is concealed --- p.36 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.39 / References --- p.41

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-88).

With the emergence of the Internet as a global structure for communication and interaction, many “business to consumer” and “business to business” applications have migrated online, thus increasing the need for software agents that can act on behalf of people, institutions or companies with private and often conflicting interests. The design of such agents, and the protocols (i.e., mechanisms) through which they interact, has therefore naturally become an important research theme. Classical mechanism design techniques from the economics literature do not account for the costs entailed with the full revelation of preferences that they require. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how to design mechanisms that only require the revelation of partial preference information and are applicable in any mechanism design context. We call this partial revelation mechanism design. Reducing revelation costs is thus our main concern. With only partial revelation, the designer has some remaining uncertainty over the agents’ types, even after the mechanism has been executed. Thus, in general, the outcome chosen will not be optimal with respect to the designer’s objective function. This alone raises interesting questions about which (part of the) information should be elicited in order to minimize the degree of sub-optimality incurred by the mechanism. But this sub-optimality of the mechanism’s outcome choice function has additional important consequences: most of the results in classical mechanism design which guarantee that agents will reveal their type truthfully to the mechanism rely on the fact that the optimal outcome is chosen. We must therefore also investigate if, and how, appropriate incentives can be maintained in partial revelation mechanisms. We start by presenting our own model for partial revelation mechanism design. Our second contribution is a negative one regarding the quasi-impossibility of implementing partial revelation mechanisms with exact incentive properties. The rest of the thesis shows, in different settings, how this negative result can be bypassed in various settings, depending on the designer's objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue...) and the interaction type (sequential or one shot). Finally, we study how the approximation of the incentive properties can be further improved when necessary, and in the process, introduce and proves the existence of a new equilibrium concept.

With the emergence of the Internet as a global structure for communication and interaction, many “business to consumer” and “business to business” applications have migrated online, thus increasing the need for software agents that can act on behalf of people, institutions or companies with private and often conflicting interests. The design of such agents, and the protocols (i.e., mechanisms) through which they interact, has therefore naturally become an important research theme. Classical mechanism design techniques from the economics literature do not account for the costs entailed with the full revelation of preferences that they require. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how to design mechanisms that only require the revelation of partial preference information and are applicable in any mechanism design context. We call this partial revelation mechanism design. Reducing revelation costs is thus our main concern. With only partial revelation, the designer has some remaining uncertainty over the agents’ types, even after the mechanism has been executed. Thus, in general, the outcome chosen will not be optimal with respect to the designer’s objective function. This alone raises interesting questions about which (part of the) information should be elicited in order to minimize the degree of sub-optimality incurred by the mechanism. But this sub-optimality of the mechanism’s outcome choice function has additional important consequences: most of the results in classical mechanism design which guarantee that agents will reveal their type truthfully to the mechanism rely on the fact that the optimal outcome is chosen. We must therefore also investigate if, and how, appropriate incentives can be maintained in partial revelation mechanisms. We start by presenting our own model for partial revelation mechanism design. Our second contribution is a negative one regarding the quasi-impossibility of implementing partial revelation mechanisms with exact incentive properties. The rest of the thesis shows, in different settings, how this negative result can be bypassed in various settings, depending on the designer's objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue...) and the interaction type (sequential or one shot). Finally, we study how the approximation of the incentive properties can be further improved when necessary, and in the process, introduce and proves the existence of a new equilibrium concept.