Tech Reports

ULCS-09-019

A Novel Method for Strategy Acquisition and its Application to a Double-Auction Market Game: Full Report

Steve Phelps, Peter McBurney and Simon Parsons


Abstract

We introduce a novel method for strategy acquisition in non-zero-sum n-player games, and empirically validate it by applying it to a well-known benchmark problem in this domain, viz the double-auction market. Many existing approaches to strategy-acquisition focus on attempting to find strategies that are robust in the sense that they are good all-round performers against all-comers. We argue that in many economic and multi-agent scenarios the robustness criterion is inappropriate; in contrast, our method focusses on searching for strategies that are likely to be adopted by participating agents. We conclude by discussing several potential applications of our algorithm, including the mechanism design problem from economics.

[Full Paper]