Artificial software agents on thin double auction markets: a human trader experiment

Author

Grossklags, Jens ; Schmidt, Carsten

Author_Institution

Inf. Manage. & Syst. Sch., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA

fYear

2003

fDate

13-16 Oct. 2003

Firstpage

400

Lastpage

407

Abstract

This paper studies how software agents influence the market behavior of human traders. Software agents with a passive arbitrage seeking strategy are introduced in a double auction market experiment with human subjects in the laboratory. As a treatment variable, the influence of information on the existence of software agents is investigated. We found that common knowledge about the presence of software agents triggers more efficient market prices in the presence of the programmed strategy whereas an effect of the information condition on behavioral variables could not be observed. Surprisingly, the introduction of software agents results in lower market efficiency in the no information treatment when compared to the baseline treatment without software agents.

Keywords

artificial intelligence; electronic commerce; marketing; software agents; agent trading strategy; arbitrageur agent; artificial software agents; baseline treatment; behavioral variables; double auction market experiment; human trader experiment; human-agent interaction; information condition; market behavior; market efficiency; market prices; passive arbitrage seeking strategy; programmed strategy; thin double auction markets; Application software; Delay; Design for experiments; Environmental economics; Graphical user interfaces; Humans; Laboratories; Psychology; Software agents; Software systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Agent Technology, 2003. IAT 2003. IEEE/WIC International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1931-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IAT.2003.1241109

Filename

1241109