Mole agents - A new phenomenon in auctions (from sellers point of view)

The advent of e-commerce has brought about a radical change in the process of auctions. This has given bidders flexibility to try and get best possible deals by participating in multiple auctions. This has also provided sellers with the opportunity of unlawfully bidding (shill bidding) in their auctions with the sole purpose of increasing their payoffs. This paper looks at the concept of shill bidding and also introduces another concept (mole bidding) through which seller can increase their payoffs. The proposed solution is based on software agents. This paper shows a high level decision making frame work for sellers using mole agent (automated alias for a mole bidder) to bid across various overlapping English auctions with varying start and end times.