An Overview and Evaluation of the Cat Market Design Competition
The rise of online commerce has led to an emerging discipline at the intersection of economics and computer science, a discipline which studies the properties and dynamics of automated trading in online marketplaces. The CAT Market Design Tournament was created to promote research into the design and deployment of economic mechanisms for such online marketplaces, particularly mechanisms able to adapt automatically to dynamic competitive environments. This research competition, which ran from 2007 to 2011), was won by four different teams and had entrants from thirteen countries. This chapter describes the motivation and history of the tournament and presents research that has arisen from it. The winners were experimentally “played off” to evaluate whether the state of the art in automated mechanism design improved during the CAT competition. The results show a clear and consistent improvement, supporting the belief that the competition has encouraged research in the field.