Ad Auctions Competition

Michael Wellman of U. Michigan and his group runs a trading agents competition annually. This year, with support of the EC community and feedback from sponsored search companies, they have designed an ad auctions competition for building trading agents to test dynamics of ad auctions. They have put a lot of thought into designing a controlled environment so the competition would provide meaningful comparisons, encourage interesting strategies, and hopefully, yield clear lessons. I would love to see participants actually set up agents to run experiments that feeds into their strategy design, because experimentation (trial-error-tweak) is (should be) an inherent part of taking part in ad auctions.