Tournament Scenario Definition

Once FM has been appropriately configured, you must engage in the definition of tournament scenarios. For this purpose, start selecting the Parameter Setting option of the FM main menu. Figure shows the default tournament definition that is expected to be deployed on your screen.

  
Figure: Tournament Parameter Setting

Next we highlight the most remarkable features of this default tournament scenario:

• Auction parameters. This scenario specifies a 3-auction tournament in which participants are not charged for participating in each bidding round (the market charge is 0). At least 5000 milliseconds separate two consecutive auctions, while 2000 milliseconds separate two consecutive bidding rounds, and 250 milliseconds two consecutive price quotations (prices called by the auctioneer). With a chosen good the auctioneer will open a bidding round employing the Downward Bidding Protocol (DBP) to auction it, thus quoting offers downward (decreasing by 10 units from offer to offer) from the good's starting price down to the good's reserve price. During the round, the auctioneer will not allow more than 3 consecutive collisions to come about. In this case the good will be randomly sold to the buyers implied in the collision. Finally, the values of the penalty factor and price increase will determine the penalty imposed on those agents submitting unsupported bids, and the new starting price of the round when either a penalty, expulsion or collision comes about.
• Buyers' Credit. All buyers have the same amount of money (10000 ptas.) at the beginning of each auction (the same per auction credit) composing the tournament.
• Information revelation. During each bidding round, FM will convey to the buyers information about the seller, the type, the starting price, and the expected resale price of the good in auction. Besides, the identity of the participants will be also made public.
• Tournament Mode.

    
  Table: Automatic Uniform Mode Lot Generation
  

  The Automatic Uniform tournament mode indicates that the lots of goods to be auctioned during each auction are generated by the auction house itself according to uniform distributions that the tournament designer must define for each type of good. Table shows the default uniform distributions used by FM to construct lots of goods

  In this way, the composition of each lot will vary from auction to auction. In section we introduce an alternative tournament mode, One auction which allows for a same lot of goods to be repeatedly auctioned.

• Participants. Looking at the Buyers window within the Participants area, we observe that three agents are defined by this tournament scenario: two software, Java, agents(akira and KQLAT) and a human agent (jar). All of them will be spawned automatically by FM  (denoted by the * symbol accompanying each agent definition in the Buyers windown) in the same machine where the auction house will be started off.

  No sellers are involved in this scenario.

Press on the Accept button to confirm this initial setting.

The following chapter will deal with more advanced features such as:

• how to build and incorporate your own agents,
• how to build agents out of the FM agent library,
• how to distribute the participants in different machines, and
• how to make FM work in multi-user mode.