Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce and Trading Agent Design and Analysis

The explosivegrowthofInternet-enabled distributed electronic marketshas p- sented participants with steadily increasing costs for search, transactions, and coordination. This has resulted in growing interest in the design of intelligent trading agents, mechanisms, and systems. Furthermore, new technologies s- porting business models are resulting in a growing volume of open and horiz- tally integrated markets for trading of an increasingly diverse sets of goods and services. However, growth of technologies for such markets requires innovative solutions to a diverse set of existing and novel technical problems which we are only beginning to understand. Speci?cally, distributed markets present not only traditional economic problems but also introduce new and challenging com- tational issues that are not represented in classic economic solution concepts. Research in agent-mediated electronic commmerce addresses these issues in thecomputationalsubstratesoftradingagents,andin theelectronicinstitutions thatsupporttrading.Insum,agent-mediatedelectronictraderequiresprincipled design(fromeconomicsandgametheory)andincorporatesnovelcombinationsof theories from di?erent disciplines such as computer science, operations research, arti?cial intelligence, and distributed systems. This volume contains revised, selected papers from the 9th Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC IX), co-located with the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS2007),andfromthe5thWorkshoponTradingAgentDesignandAn- ysis(TADA), co-locatedwiththe The 22ndAAAI ConferenceonArti?cialInt- ligence (AAAI 2007). The primary, and complementary, goal of both workshops was to continue to bring together novel work from diverse ?elds that focus on modeling, implementation, and evaluation of computational trading institutions and/or agent strategies. ThepapersinthisvolumethatoriginatedatAMECfocusonalargevarietyof issuesonauctions,negotiation,andstrategicbehaviorinelectronicmarketplaces. As to auctions, Constantin et al. focus on auction design. They adopt a c- putational approach to the design of dynamic, interdependent-value auctions.