A Generic Auction Server

Exhibitor: Andrew Whitby

Supervisor: Guido Governatori

Research Group: Data and Knowledge Engineering

Industry Sector: Finance

With the growing popularity of the Internet, computerized auction systems have entered the mainstream as a means of enabling consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business exchange. At present, the overwhelming majority of these systems use the ascending-price English auction format, despite the wealth of alternative formats described in the auctions literature. One reason for this may be the superficial dissimilarities between many of the auction formats; a single auction server cannot straightforwardly support a wide variety of formats without introducing a high level of complexity.

We propose a structure that unifies the representation of many auction formats and the design of supporting servers. The structure relies on two orthogonal characteristics of auction formats: the round structure and the participant cardinality. By dividing support for these two characteristics (and associated auction parameters) into two object-oriented components, we arrive at a design which is comparatively simple given its representational flexibility. An initial prototype has been built as a proof-of-concept, and specific configurations that emulate many common auction formats are described.

This work appears quite promising and could be extended in several ways. In particular, suggestions are provided for extending the framework to support advanced formats such as multiple unit auctions and continuous auctions. Another important extension would be to build a robust, production-ready implementation, to test the scalability of the design. Finally, the challenge remains of describing auction mechanisms in a way that can be sensibly interpreted by autonomous software trading agents.

Thesis Document (PDF)