Strategies and heuristics used by the UMBCTAC agent in the third Trading Agent Competition

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Date

2003-08-13

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Abstract

The UMBCTAC agent was one of the top ranked agents in the third international Trading Agent Com-petition (TAC'02). This paper describes and evalu-ates the key heuristics used by UMBCTAC, includ-ing the early bird heuristic, the balance heuristic, and the separation heuristic. We developed a simple gain-risk model to search safe and profitable allocations for hotel rooms and airline tickets. We also used a novel probabilistic approach to dynamically allocate entertainment tickets and bid in entertainment auc-tions. We conclude with a description of ongoing and planned work.