Automated Analysis of Auction Traces

When agents participate in an auction, either as buyers or sellers, it is important to be able to verify compliance to auction protocols and correctness of auction clearing. We propose a method for such a verification which is based on analyzing execution traces of the auction. Our method has the advantage that it does not require access to the internal of the agents, hence it is applicable to any auction, even auctions with human and agent participants, as long as the auction trace is available. The approach is based on an expressive temporal logic in which properties for auction types and for agent strategies are specified. Examples of trace analysis are used to illustrate the approach. Finally, experimental results are presented using synthetic data.