Options are a basic, widely-traded form of financial derivative that offer payouts based on the future price of an underlying asset. The finance literature gives us option-trading algorithms that take into consideration information about how prices move over time but do not explicitly involve the trades the agent made in the past. In contrast, the prediction market literature gives us automated market-making agents (like the popular LMSR) that are event-independent and price trades based only on the inventories the agent holds. We simulate the performance of five trading agents inspired by these literatures on a large database of recent historical option prices. We find that a combination of the two approaches produced the best results in our experiments: a trading agent that keeps track of previously-made trades combined with a good prior distribution on how prices move over time. The experimental success of this synthesized trader has implications for agent design in both financial and prediction markets. 1

A market maker sets prices over time for wagers that pay out contingent on the future state of the world. The market maker has knowledge of the probability of realizing each state of the world, and of how the price of a bet affects the probability that traders will accept it. We compare the optimal policy for risk-neutral (expected utility maximizing) and Kelly criterion (expected log-utility maximizing) market makers. Computing the optimal policy for a risk-neutral market maker is relatively simple, while computing the optimal policy for a Kelly criterion market maker is challenging, requiring advanced techniques adapted from the computational economics literature to run efficiently. We show that while a riskneutral market maker has an optimal policy that does not depend on the market maker’s state, a Kelly criterion market maker’s optimal policy has an intricate dependence on both time and state. Counterintuitively, a Kelly criterion market maker may offer bets that are myopically irrational with respect to the market maker’s beliefs for the entire trading period. In contrast, a risk-neutral market maker never offers a myopically irrational bet.

Automated market makers are algorithmic agents that price fixed-odds bets with traders. Four key qualities for automated market makers have appeared in the artificial intelligence literature: (1) bounded loss, (2) the ability to make a profit, (3) a vanishing bid/ask spread, and (4) unlimited market depth. Intriguingly, market makers that satisfy any three of these desiderata have appeared in the literature. However, it is an open question as to whether there exist market makers which can simultaneously satisfy all four of these properties; the issue is not simple to resolve because several of the qualities are oppositional, particularly in tandem. In this paper, we answer the open question in the affirmative by constructing market makers that satisfy all four qualities.