Dutch Flower Auction Recommender Agent

Last LARGE meeting, I (Meditya Wasesa) presented the status of the Recommender Agent development in the Dutch Flower Auction domain.

I reported that we have finalized the first step of data exploration, that is meant to elicit all determining factors which significantly influence the revenue of a good in Dutch Flower Auction domain. Our exploratory research infers that there are several auction design parameters which the auctioneer can adjust to control the level of revenue.

Knowing these auction design parameters, we have developed an analytical that we will drive the logic of the future recommender agent. At future we will implement our analytical model to a recommendation agent and will test it with simulation, lab experiments, and field experiments.

Meeting Minutes - 21 January 2009

The 21st of January Peter Berends presented "The Impact of Clock Speeds on Bidders’ Arousal in Dutch Auctions". A paper by M. Adam, J. Krämer, C. Weinhardt (2008). 

In this study an experiment was conducted to show the impact of clock speed on "competitive arousal" and seller revenue. This paper was of interest to us, since in order to create intelligent agents that support human actors in the Dutch Flower Network we need to investigate the influence of speed in Dutch auctions.

When considering Adam's et al. study, the results in regard to seller revenue in this experiment are somewhat contradictory to prior experiments. It was found that seller revenue in a slower auction was not significantly different from fast auctions. Furthermore, differences in the variance of seller revenue between the slow and fast auctions were observed. Faster auctions have greater variance. This led to authors to believe that competitive arousal is not a function of elapsed time alone. This was previously asserted by Katok and Kwasnica (2008). The results clearly prove that, higher levels of skin conductivity are found in fast auctions compared to low. This means that arousal is higher for fast auctions.

In the discussion between the participants at LARGE we discussed whether the variance between the slow and the fast auction could be explained by the fact that subjects might become bored when participating in the auction experiment. They might become bored, because they play against only one other participant and in the slow auction the maximum length is theoretically 16:40min.

Meeting Minutes - 14 January 2009

Today I presented an overview of the priorly discussed articles on Dutch auctions. The following articles were discussed:

• Van den Berg and Van der Klauw, 2008. A Structural Empirical Analysis of Dutch Flower Auctions
• Katok and Kwasnica, 2008. Time is money: The effect of clock speed on seller’s revenue in Dutch auctions
• Carare and Rothkopf, 2005. Slow Dutch Auctions

There was a discussion on what we can learn from the theoretic models as modeled in these articles when building a theoretic model for super fast auctions as in the DFA.

• It was noted that the DFA has sequential auctions, which means that the cost of returning to the auction exists but not at the level of an individual auction.
• It was noted that 'Competitive Arousal' as discussed in Katok and Kwasnica exists in a different form in super fast auctions, since it is unlikely that within an individual auction levels of arousal differ.
• It was agreed that 'competitive arousal' in fast auctions could very well be a function of time, possibly not linear per se but this could be a good first start for building a model. Futhermore, the issue of arousal for experience was discussed because bidders who have been trading for years might not be influence very much by emotions.

Peter