JCAT is the software platform for the Market Design Competition (CAT) under the umbrella of the Trading Agent Competition (TAC). The CAT Competition supports multiple marketplaces that run in parallel and compete against each other to attract traders and make profit. Each entrant of the CAT Competition runs a marketplace, and set the market rules so as to win the game according to a certain set of assessment criteria. Traders, which are provided by the competition organizers, can move between marketplaces to explore and select the best marketplace to trade in to maximize their own profits. JCAT includes the CAT game server, trading strategies and marketplace selection strategies to configure trading agents, i.e., traders, and a parameterized, reference implementation of market mechanism that enables entrants to get started easily.

The annual CAT competitions have been successfully held from 2007 through 2011, respectively in conjunction with:

• AAAI 2007 at Vancouver, Canada,
• AAAI 2008 at Chicago, USA,
• IJCAI 2009 at Pasadena, California, USA,
• ACM EC 2010 at Boston, USA, and
• IJCAI 2011 at Barcelona, Spain.

Various teams have released their agents in the TAC Agent Repository.

JCAT was initially built for the CAT Competition, but has been extensively used in experimental mechanism design research and education. If you would like to collaborate on research, or have suggestions or comments, please feel free to contact Jinzhong Niu at jniu at gradcenter.cuny.edu. Thank you!