At Brown, we are researching trading agent design and analysis (TADA) with two complementary goals in mind: to evaluate agent strategies in electronic markets; and to evaluate market designs, given a group of intelligent software agents.

Trading agents are programmed traders that operate autonomously in the marketplace, sending bids, requesting quotes, accepting offers, and generally negotiating deals according to market rules. (Humans do not intervene while negotiations are in progress.) To play the market effectively, agents must make decisions in real-time in uncertain, dynamic environments. Successful agents rapidly assimilate information from multiple sources, forecast future events, optimize the allocation of their resources, anticipate strategic interactions, and learn from their experiences.

The TADA Research Group at Brown actively participates in the annual Trading Agent Competition (TAC), a game-based platform for experimentation with trading agent strategies and electronic market designs.