Price determination and profit sharing for bidding groups in agent-mediated auctions

Abstract

It is a common behavior that a group of rational agents cooperate together as a bidder/seller to bid in an auction. How to determine the group bidding price and how to share the profit among the members in a group has been problems that are not studied thoroughly. In time-critical auctions, the problem is getting more complicated since the group has to decide new bidding prices within time limits. Conventional approaches used a centralized mechanism to assign profit share to each bidding agent in the group that usually lead to negative profit of individual bidding agent. We propose a distributed approach called Z-process that allows individual bidding agents to declare their compromised profit share based on their rationalities, and determines the group bidding prices simultaneously. We show that in Z-process there exists a dominant strategy for rational agents that can let them obtain maximum profit. We can also show that the compromised profit of each individual bidding agent by Z-process satisfies each agent's rationality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.