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Abstract : |
Abstract. As traditional commerce moves on-line more business transactions will be mediated by software agents, and the ability of agentmediated electronic marketplaces to e ciently allocate resources will be highly dependent on the complexity of the decision problems that agents face; determined in part by the structure of the marketplace, resource characteristics, and the nature of agents ' local problems. We compare auction performance for agents that have hard local problems, and uncertain values for goods. Perhaps an agentmust solve a hard optimization problem to value a good, or interact with a busy and expensive human expert. Although auction design cannot simplify the valuation problem itself, we show that good auction design can simplify meta-deliberation { providing incentives for the \right " agents to deliberate for the \right" amount of time. Empirical results for a particular cost-bene t model of deliberation show that an ascending-price auction will often support higher revenue and e ciency than other auction designs. The price provides agents with useful information about the value that other agents hold for the good., |
