• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.11
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• pp.1099-1110
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• 2005

As auctions become popular, developing good agent bidding strategies has been an important focus in agent-based electronic commerce research. Especially for the continuous double auctions where no single dominant strategy is known, the agent bidding strategy has practical significance. This paper introduces an adaptive agent strategy for the countinuous double auction. The central idea is to let the agent figure out at run time when the sophisticated strategy (called the p-strategy) is beneficial and when a simpler strategy is better. Balance between exploration and exploitation is achieved by using a heuristic exploration function that trades off the expected profits and the number of tries of each strategy. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of the adaptive strategy in a wide variety of environments. The experiment results indicate that the adaptive strategy outperforms the plain p-strategy when the p-strategy performs poorly, while it performs similar to the p-strategy when the p-strategy dominates the other simple strategies.