Trading Experiments using Financial Agents in a Simulated Cloud Computing Commodity Market

John Cartlidge

2014

Abstract

In September 2012, Amazon, the leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, launched a secondary marketplace venue for users to buy and sell cloud resources between themselves—the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace (ARIM). ARIM is designed to encourage users to purchase more long-term reserved instances, thus generating more stable demand for the provider and additional revenue through commission on sales. In this paper, we model ARIM using a multi-agent simulation model populated with zero-intelligence plus (ZIP) financial trading agents. We demonstrate that ARIM offers a new opportunity for market makers (MMs) to profit from buying and selling resources, but suggest that this opportunity may be fleeting. We also demonstrate that altering the market mechanism from a retail market (where only sellers post offers; similar to ARIM) to a continuous double auction (where both buyers and sellers post offers) can result in higher sale prices and therefore higher commissions. Since IaaS is a multi-billion dollar industry and currently the fastest growing segment of the cloud computing market, we therefore suggest that Amazon may profit from altering the mechanism of ARIM to enable buyers to post bids.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Cartlidge J. (2014). Trading Experiments using Financial Agents in a Simulated Cloud Computing Commodity Market . In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-758-016-1, pages 311-317. DOI: 10.5220/0004925303110317


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart14,
author={John Cartlidge},
title={Trading Experiments using Financial Agents in a Simulated Cloud Computing Commodity Market},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2014},
pages={311-317},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004925303110317},
isbn={978-989-758-016-1},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - Trading Experiments using Financial Agents in a Simulated Cloud Computing Commodity Market
SN - 978-989-758-016-1
AU - Cartlidge J.
PY - 2014
SP - 311
EP - 317
DO - 10.5220/0004925303110317