TOWARDS A TEST-BED FOR TRADING AGENTS IN ELECTRONIC AUCTION MARKETS

We present a framework for defining trading scenarios based on fish ma rket auctions. In these scenarios, trading (buyer and seller) heteroge neous (human and software) agents of arbitrary complexity participate in auctions under a collection of standardized market conditions and a re evaluated against their actual market performance. We argue that su ch competitive situations constitute convenient problem domains in whi ch to study issues related with agent architectures in general and age nt-based trading strategies in particular. The proposed framework, con ceived and implemented as an extension of FM96.5 (a Java-based version of the Fish,market auction house), constitutes a test-bed for trading agents in auction tournament environments, EM97.6. Finally, we illust rate how to generate tournaments with the aid of our test-bed by defin ing and running a very simple tournament involving a set of rudimentar y buyer agents.