Abstract

AstonCAT-Plus: An Efficient Specialist for the TAC Market Design Tournament
AstonCAT-Plus: An Efficient Specialist for the TAC Market Design Tournament
Meng Chang, Minghua He, Xudong Luo
This paper describes the strategies used by AstonCAT-Plus, the post-tournament version of the specialist designed for the TAC Market Design Tournament 2010. It details how AstonCAT-Plus accepts shouts, clears market, sets transaction prices and charges fees. Through empirical evaluation, we show that AstonCAT-Plus not only outperforms AstonCAT (tournament version) significantly but also achieves the second best overall score against some top entrants of the competition. In particular, it achieves the highest allocative efficiency, transaction success rate and average trader profit among all the specialists in our controlled experiments.