This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 17th and 18th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, AMEC TADA 2015 and 2016, which took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in May 2015, and in New York City, USA, in July 2016. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Both workshops aim to present a cross-section of the state of the art in automated electronic markets and encourage theoretical and empirical work that deals with both the individual agent level as well as the system level. Given the breadth of research topics in this field, the range of topics addressed in these papers is correspondingly broad. They range from papers that study theoretical issues, related to the design of interaction protocols and marketplaces, to the design and analysis of automated trading strategies used by individual agents - which are often developed as part of an entry to one of the tracks of the Trading Agents Competition.

This volume contains 12 thoroughly refereed and revised papers detailing recent advances in research on designing trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated e-commerce. They were originally presented at three events: the Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2013), co-located with AAMAS 2013 in Saint Paul, MN, USA, in May 2013; the Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2013), co-located with AAAI 2013 in Bellevue, WA, USA, in July 2013; and the Joint Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2014) and Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2014), co-located with AAMAS 2014 in Paris, France, in May 2014. Given the breadth of research topics in this field, the range of topics addressed in these papers is correspondingly broad. These include the study of theoretical issues related to the design of interaction protocols and marketplaces; the design and analysis of automated trading strategies used by individual agents; and the deployment of such strategies, in times as part of an entry to the trading agent competition.

This volume contains 11 thoroughly refereed and revised papers detailing recent advances in research on designing trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated e-commerce. They were originally presented at the Joint Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2012) and Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2012) co-located with AAMAS 2012 in Valencia, Spain, in June 2012. The increasing reliance on software agents has created a range of pressing new research challenges, including the design of appropriate agent decision algorithms, approaches for predicting the complex behaviors and interactions of multiple agents, including the computation of equilibria, and the engineering of protocols and mechanisms that ensure electronic markets behave in a stable manner or fulfill other desirable criteria. Drawing upon a diverse range of scientific disciplines, including computer science, economics, artificial intelligence, operations research and game theory, the papers collected in this volume represent a cross-section of recent research and cover topics such as strategies for individual trading agents, the design of markets and interaction protocols between agents, and a variety of applications.

This volume contains ten thoroughly refereed and revised papers detailing recent advances in research on designing trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated e-commerce. They were originally presented at the 13th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2011), collocated with AAMAS 2011 in Taipei, Taiwan, or at the 2011 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2011), collocated with IJCAI 2011 in Barcelona, Spain.The papers presented at these two workshops illustrate both the depth and broad range of research topics in this field. They range from providing solutions to open theoretical problems in online scheduling and bargaining under uncertainty, to designing bidding agents in a wide area of application areas, such as electronic commerce, supply chain management, or keyword advertising, to designing agents that can successfully replicate actual human behaviors in realistic games.

This volume contains 9 thoroughly refereed and revised papers detailing recent advances in research on designing trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated e-commerce. They were originally presented at the 12th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2010), collocated with AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada, or the 2010 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2010), collocated with EC 2010 in Cambridge, MA, USA. The papers examine emerging topics such as ad auctions and supply chains, or the interactions between competing markets, and present novel algorithms and rigorous theoretical results. Several of them evaluate their results using real data from large e-commerce sites or from experiments with human traders.

The story begins on the Konkan coast in the nineteenth century, when Bathseba, a woman of great moral courage, steers her family through the odds in the absence of her husband. The family distinguishes itself when her great-grandson David earns renown as a doctor in Ahmedabad. Displaying a remarkably different kind of empathy, his exuberant son Joshua raises lions, panthers and crocodiles as pets, and later founds a zoo. Things come full circle when Joshua's daughter Esther embarks on a journey to Israel in search of her roots, amidst the confusion of a failed marriage and the turmoil in her place of birth, Ahmedabad. Seamlessly blending storytelling, history and memoir, Book of Esther shines fresh light on the Jewish experience in India and becomes an affecting tale about love, home and belonging.

Alive with the scents and smells of India, this novel traces the rigid, curcumscribed lives of three generations of women in an extended Jewish family in the walled city of Ahmedabad. It is a brutally honest story of Indian Jews under siege in a society unlike any other where Jews have made a home.