JASA

A high performance open-sourceauction simulator

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~sphelps/jasa

Steve Phelpssphelps@csc.liv.ac.ukAgent Research & Technology GroupUniversity of Liverpool

Background: auctions

• Centralised resource allocation• Agents submit their utility functions to a “system

agent” (auctioneer), which computes the optimal allocation and payments.

• Typically used when:– Valuations (utility functions) vary rapidly over time– Agents are uncertain about their own valuation– Speed of convergence to the optimal allocation is a

high-priority design objective– When we have an impromptu need to “thicken” the

market: gather many buyers and sellers together simultaneously

Mechanism design

• Design objectives can vary:– Maximise social welfare– Maximise seller revenue– Minimise time to convergence– Minimise computational complexity– Budget balance

• No single optimal design- auction design is a MOO problem

• Auction theory results fail to hold for many real-world auctions– Exchanges are particular hard

• Hence simulations can sometimes shed light on the grey areas.

Requirements

• A flexible laboratory framework for Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE)

• In ACE we often need to run experiments very many times.

• We’re interested in applying evolutionary computing to ACE

• We would like to experiment with many different auction mechanisms, trading strategies and learning algorithms

• Replication work: we would like a set of reference-implementations for the above

Design

• Light-weight & High-performance

• Highly extensible

• Open-source

• Readable code

• Integration with ECJ for performing experiments using evolutionary computinghttp://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/

.. Demo ..

Open Source

• JASA is a community-led project• Hosted at Sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasa

• Current contributors:– Jinzhong Niu (CUNY)– Marek Marcinkiewicz (Columbia)

• We welcome further contributions in the form of:– New functionality (eg new trading strategies, learning algorithms,

auction types)– Suggestions for improvement– Bug reports– Bug fixes– Anything else!

• Contact sphelps@csc.liv.ac.uk to become involved.