Meeting Minutes - 18 December 2008

Today, I (Meditya Wasesa)have presented a working paper entitled "Time is money: The Effect of Clock Speed on Seller's Revenue in Dutch Auction" written by Elena Katok and Anthony M. Kwasnica of Department of Economics of Smeal College of Business, Penn State University.

The paper presents an experiment and a formula that show the correlation between the clock speed and the sellers revenue in dutch auction. In brief, slower clock speed brings lower revenue, and faster clock speed brigs higher revenue. They have built a nice simple formula that explains this phenomenon by the use of the monitoring cost and the non monetary enjoyment, as the time affected parameters as important factors that affect the end revenue.


In the discussion, the group discussed troughly about the experiment settings that this paper utilized. We tried to analized the pros and the cons about the settings and the formulation which we want to extend at our proposed dutch flower auction experiment.

Meeting Minutes - 3 December 2008

Today, I (Meditya Wasesa) have presented a working paper entitled “A Structural Empirical Analysis of Dutch Flower Auction” written by Gerard van der Berg and Bas van der Klaauw of Department of Economics of Free University Amsterdam.

The paper goals are to define the bidders valuation, determine the optimal seller's reserve value, and see the effect of reserve value adjustment (changing the value of current reserve value to the calculated reserve value) to the corresponding revenue. It is presumed that by adjusting the existing reserve value to an optimized value, a higher revenue could be gained.

The one that is interesting, the authors did not only observed the winning bids record, but also the losing bids (in an interval up to 1 second). Similar previous papers usually only consider the winning bids in their model. They believe that this extra observation could improve their prediction on the distribution of private values of the bidders. The other thing that the writers did is that they use a markov chain monte-carlo and gibbs sampling in the projection of the private values of the bidder.

In general, the flow of the research can be presented as the scheme above. First they observe the recorded data (winning and losing bids). Second they try to mimic the historical data to a valuation distribution of bidders by using the a markov chain monte-carlo and gibbs sampling (they do this step in 4 scenarios). Third then they calculate the optimal reserve bid and also the corresponding delta of revenue. By their finding the increment of the reserve price will not bring big change to the increase of the revenue.

However the conclusion of this paper is not final yet, the team planned to have another discussion about this paper in some other time to really grasp the essence of the paper.

Meeting Minutes – 26 November 2008

Today, Paul R. Schrater a guest researcher from University Minnesota, has made a presentation about active preference learning topics. He explained a topic of probability model in which an agent can derive a continous valuation formula which is a result from learning algorithm from a set of discrete data. He tried to explained the algorithm which can decide what approximate formula can be presented to an individual in order to find the projected result that they value highly in as few trial as possible, without making an accurate model the entire valuation surface.



About the presenter,

Paul R. Schrater hold a joint faculty position at the University of Minnesota, in the departments of Psychology and Computer Science. His current research interests generally involve using probabilistic methods to study issues in perception and motor control. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Pennsylvania, under David Knill, then of the Department of Psychology and Eero Simoncelli in the GRASP Laboratory who at that time had a primary appointment in the Department of Computer Science at Penn. His dissertation involved a psychophysical and ideal observer analysis of local motion processing.

Meeting Minutes - 19 November 2008

Today, the LARGE session has had a very nice presentation from Carsten Block, a ready to finish doctoral candidate of Information & Market Engineering department, TU Karlsruhe Germany. At our session he presented the topic of "Market-Based Control and Agent-Based Trading in Combined and Power Grids." which is pretty much the topic which has been the area of his doctoral specialization.

The background of the research is the emerging trends of the energy supply which is no longer in hierarchical setup of up down (e.g. from the source to household) distribution, but also in the reversal direction. So that not only the source can sell their energy to the downstream but also the downstream line if they produce energy, the downstream costumer can also sell their energy to the upstream.

This issue of developing two ways of distribution is explained pretty much from different perspectives. But especially, since the energy transaction mechanism between the upstream and the downstream mechanism is built in the agent based point of view and also the mechanism of transaction is involving auction mechanism, so a lot of things what Carsten have applied in his research pretty much coherent with the LARGE field. This session off course has brought big lesson fur the group.

The discussion of this reversible energy transaction is pretty much done in multiple perspectives, since in this session a lot of people come from different area of specialization (e.g. economics, business network, information and decision sciences, etc). Carsten did an excellent explanation also to the multi-background viewer’s questions.

Since Carsten have a strong computer science background, he also shared some of his experiences (e.g. tool for development) in the development of his project. He introduced us a new tools for faster software development like grailsTM and make some demo also about what the platform advances. This session was very successful and everybody was enthusiastic.

Meeting Minutes - 12 November 2008

Today Uzay Kaymak gave a presentation on the Ming Hua and Nicholas Jenning's paper of "Designing a Successful Trading Agent: A Fuzzy Set Aproach".

The paper tells us about the writers experience in implementing fuzzy logics in their SouthamptonTAC agent.

SouthhamptonTAC agent participated successfully in the first and second (TAC) Trading Agent Competition, a competition which facilitates the competition of the participant's "travel" agents in fulfilling their customer demand of travel package (flight ticket, hotel, and extra entertainment ticket). Those participating agents should compete with each other in different (flight ticket, hotel, and extra entertainment ticket) auctions provided by the TAC platform to statisfy the demand of the agent's costumer.

Uzay briefly explains how the SouthamptonTAC implements the fuzzy logics in the hotel, ticket, and entertaiment bidding actions. He (Uzay) found it quiet surprising how the performance of the fuzzy rules implementation can work well on the competition.

The presentation, is wrapped up by a small discussion about the competition conditions. Wolf gives the audience some description about the condition of the TAC competition (The rounds, the finalists, etc.).

Meeting Minutes - 15 October 2008

Katalin led a discussion on the agent definitions and agent properties. She presented first a number of definitions from the literature mainly based on the article by Franklin and Gaesser. We compared and analyzed these definitions, especially w.r.t. to their properties and also discussed how these relate to the broad definition by Norvig and Russel.

It seems that there are three types of agents defined: “agents”, “autonomous agents” and “intelligent agents”. It is not always clear, however whether authors mean in fact agents with different properties when using these notions. Autonomy is a basic property that seemingly all agents should possess. However, we couldn’t really agree on what autonomy means. Explanations we gave varied from the notion of being “independent” to being “goal-oriented”, “pro-active”. The conclusion is that there are different degrees of autonomy.

With respect to the agents properties it also seems that learning and adaptation are sometimes interchanged.

In the second part of the meeting the CAS (Complex Adaptive System) definition has been focused, and agent-based modeling as an approach. Here the focus is on agents as interactive individual entities, and the emergent system properties. Agents are classified in three classes based on the rules they use and their level of adaptation: simple agents, complex-rule agents and advanced-rule agents.

Katalin concludes that we shouldn’t really bother about the many definitions; there are agents with different properties and different complexities. What should be important, however, is that authors give a clear description of what they call an “agent” in their paper, which properties the agents have, with definition of these properties.

Meeting Minutes - 21 July, 2008

Today Peter Berends held a presentation discussing the case “The Application of Intelligent Personalised Agents for Buyer Decision Empowerment at the Dutch Flower Auction (DFA)”.

The DFA consists of six individual auctions located throughout the Netherlands which each host a couple of clock auctions on which goods are auctioned. In total there are 39 clocks on the DFA.

When buying through a clock auction, buyers aim to buy at the lowest price. Thus, they try to show their interest at the very latest possible moment. However, caution needs to be exercised because reacting too late means forgoing the ability to buy the auctioned product because other buyers might have jumped on the opportunity. As a consequence, buying through clock auctions is not an easy job. There is also a remote application through which buyers can buy at the DFA from any location. Many buyers procure for their customers who are located at different locations, and there are six different auctions of the DFA in the Netherlands. This means that when remotely buying, buyers could optimise the transportation cost and transportation time by making sure they buy products from an auction that is in close proximity to the location where they need to ship the goods.

This means that there are four main decision parameters to be considered with every buy: (1) price; (2) quality measures; (3) transportation costs; and (4) transportation time. There was a discussion on how intelligent agent-based systems could be utilized to empower buyers in their decision making.

After the presentation a discussion was held about where best to apply the agents, their benefits, and the information the agents need to base its decision on.