Tools and Techniques for Automated Mechanism Design

This is the home page for NSF IIS-0329037, which was funded from September 2003 until September 2008.

The project was concerned with the process of automatically constructing economic mechanisms, or markets, with a specific interest in double auction markets.

Specifically we constructed tools to make it possible to

    co-evolve auction mechanisms and trading behaviors.
The idea being that then it is possible to find mechanisms that have desirable properties when traders change their behavior in order to exploit weaknesses in the mechanism.

The project has shown that it is possible:

    to evolve useful new auction mechanisms using genetic programming and genetic algorithms when given a fixed set of trading strategies.
    to learn new trading strategies that outperform combinations of existing trading strategies in a fixed auction mechanism.
    to co-evolve a combination of trading mechanism and trading strategies that optimise a given set of metrics.
In addition, we have carried out a series of experiments on the effects of running several parallel markets for the same good, and have been involved in the running of the Trading Agent Competition Market Design game.

This site mainly offers access to:

from the project.

If you have any questions about, or comments on, the project please send email to: parsons@sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu