title: A novel method for strategy acquisition and its application to a double-auction market game.
abstract: We introduce a method for strategy acquisition in nonzero-sum n -player games and empirically validate it by applying it to a well-known benchmark problem in this domain, namely, the double-auction market. Many existing approaches to strategy acquisition focus on attempting to find strategies that are robust in the sense that they are good all-round performers against all-comers. We argue that, in many economic and multiagent scenarios, the robustness criterion is inappropriate; in contrast, our method focuses on searching for strategies that are likely to be adopted by participating agents, which is formalized as the size of a strategy's basins of attraction under the replicator dynamics.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents, University of Essex, CO43SQ Colchester, U.K. sphelps@essex.ac.uk
authors.forename: Steve
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Phelps
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: McBurney
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Parsons
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D004465:Economic Competition; D005716:Game Theory; D040541:Marketing / Q000379:methods*; D008962:Models, Theoretical