Strategies and heuristics used by the UMBCTAC agent in the third Trading Agent Competition

The UMBCTAC agent was one of the top ranked agents in the third international Trading Agent Com-petition (TAC'02). This paper describes and evalu-ates the key heuristics used by UMBCTAC, includ-ing the early bird heuristic, the balance heuristic, and the separation heuristic. We developed a simple gain-risk model to search safe and profitable allocations for hotel rooms and airline tickets. We also used a novel probabilistic approach to dynamically allocate entertainment tickets and bid in entertainment auc-tions. We conclude with a description of ongoing and planned work.