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<article-title>Outperforming the Competition in Multi-Unit Sealed Bid Auctions</article-title>
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<author><a href="mailto:iv@ecs.soton.ac.uk"><name>Ioannis A. Vetsikas</name></a></author>
<aff>School of Electronics and Computer Science<br/> University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:nrj@ecs.soton.ac.uk"><name>Nicholas R. Jennings</name></a></author>
<aff>School of Electronics and Computer Science <br/>University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK</aff>

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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>In this paper, we examine the behavior of bidding agents
that are in direct competition with the other participants in
an auction setting. Thus the agents are not simply trying
to maximize their own utility, rather they wish to maximize
a weighted difference of their own gain to that of their com-
petitors. By so doing, this work significantly extends the
existing state-of-the-art results on single unit auctions, by
generalizing to the multi-unit case. Specifically, our main
result is the derivation of symmetric Bayes-Nash equilibria
for these agents in both <italic>m</italic><sup>th</sup> and (<italic>m</italic>+ 1)<sup>th </sup>price sealed bid
auctions. Subsequently, we use these equilibria to examine
the profits of different agents and show that aiming to beat
the competition is more effective than pure self interest in
any competitive setting. Finally, we examine how the auc-
tioneer's revenue is affected and find that the weight that
agents place in minimizing the opponents' profit determines
whether the <italic>m</italic><sup>th</sup> or the (<italic>m</italic>+ 1)<sup>th </sup> price auction yields a
higher revenue.</p>
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