Software Agents in Multiple Adaptive Double Auction Markets

The prevalence of on-line auctions has stimulated the interest of both the economists and computer scientists in an effort to understand and improve their rules. One famous form of these economic mechanisms is the double auction and, more specifically, the continuous double auction which is commonly used in today´s major stock exchanges worldwide. Software agents constitute a promising tool for the study and implementation of novel double auction mechanisms. TAC Market Design Tournament makes an attempt to study the competition among such dynamically adjusted market institutions trying to attract potential traders while maximizing their profit. In this paper we describe the tournament and discuss about the importance of the global competitive equilibrium in its economy. Moreover,we provide a simple, yet effective estimation technique for the latter that our entrant, Mertacor, has utilized during the games of 2008.