Decision-theoretic bidding in online-auctions

With the increasing role of electronic commerce in business applications, much attention is paid to online-auctions. As auctions become more and more popular in electronic commerce, agents face the problem of participating in multiple independent auctions simultaneously or in sequence. Decision making of agents becomes difficult when they have to buy bundles of goods. In this case the agents have to cope with substitutable or complementary effects between the single goods. In this paper we analyse existing approaches of tackling the problem of decision making in multiple, heterogeneous auctions and develop a flexible Dynamic Programming-based decision-making framework for agents, participating in multiple auctions. This work extends existing Dynamic Programming-approaches in this field.