Tech Reports

ULCS-09-005

Overview of CAT: A Market Design Competition (version 2.0)

Kai Cai, Enrico Gerding, Peter McBurney, Jinzhong Niu, Simon Parsons and Steve Phelps

Abstract

This document presents detailed information on the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) Mechanism Design Tournament, also known as the CAT Tournament, being held in July 2009. CAT is an abbreviation of catallactics, the science of economic exchange. The document is version 2.0 of the overview, and is issued on 30 April 2009. It replaces version 1.1, which was issued on 6 June 2007 (as University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science Technical Report ULCS-07-006). Version 2.0 of this document is issued as University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science Technical Report ULCS-09-005.

The document explains the design and operation of the CAT Tournament and provides information on the strategies to be used by the agent traders. The document also provides references to the growing list of research publications on or about the CAT Tournament and the mechanism designs of participating specialists.

The 2009 CAT Tournament will be hosted by the Trading Agents Competition, which is being held at IJCAI 2009, in Pasadena, CA, USA in July 2009. The document needs to be read in conjunction with the other documents and software available for public download on the sourceforge site for project jcat, the CAT Market Design Competition.

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