Thanks to slumping¹ markets, investment banks are shedding many of their highly-paid traders. When markets recover, the banks might be tempted² to replace them with rather cheaper talent. One alternative has been around for a while but has yet to catch on: autonomous³ trading agents-computers programmed to act like the human version without such pesky costs as holidays, lunch breaks or bonuses. Program trading has, of course, been done before; some blamed the 1987 stockmarket crash on computers instructed with simple decision-making rules. But robots can be smarter than that.

由于市场不景气，投资银行辞退了许多高薪交易员。等到市场恢复，银行也许会用薪资更低廉的人才来取代他们。现在他们又多了一个选择：电子交易员---经过编程可以像人一样工作，但却不需要休假，午餐休息或者奖金等烦人的支出的电脑。这种电子交易员已经面世一段时间了，但尚未流行起来。以前当然也出现过程序交易；有人就把1987年的股市崩盘归罪于那些只按照简单决策规则指令工作的电脑。不过机器人会聪明得多。

Dave Cliff, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol, England, has been creating trading robots for seven years. In computer simulations he lets them evolve "genetically⁴", and so allows them to adapt and fit models of real-world financial markets. His experiments have suggested that a redesign of some markets could lead to greater efficiency. Last year, a research group at IBM showed that Mr Cliff's artificial traders could consistently beat the human variety, in various kinds of market. Nearly all take the shape of an auction⁵. One well-known type is the English auction, familiar to patrons of the salesrooms of Christie's and Sotheby's, where sellers keep mum on their offer price, and buyers increase their bids by stages until only one remains⁶.

大卫·克利夫是英国布里斯托惠普实验室的研究员，7年来他一直致力于创造交易机器人。在计算机仿真试验中，他使这些机器人“按照遗传方式”不断发展，以使它们适应并且适合真实金融市场的各种模式。他的实验意味着对某些市场进行重新设计可能会大幅提高效率。去年，IBM的一个研究小组证明克利夫的人造交易员可以在各种市场上击败真人交易员。几乎所有这些实验都是以拍卖的形式进行的。其中一种著名的拍卖形式就是英式拍卖，克里斯蒂和索斯比拍卖行的顾客对此都很熟悉，卖家不报出他们的竞拍价，而买家则不断抬高竞拍价铬，直到只有一位买家出价为止。

At the other extreme is the Dutch auction, familiar to 17th-century tulip-traders in the Netherlands as well as to bidders⁷ for American Treasury⁸ bonds. Here, buyers remain silent, and a seller reduces his price until it is accepted. Most markets for shares, commodities, foreign exchange and derivatives⁹ are a hybrid¹⁰ of these two types: buyers and sellers can announce their bid or offer prices at any time, and deals are constantly being closed, a so-called "continuous double auction".

另外一种形式是荷兰式拍卖，它是十七世纪荷兰的郁金香商人以及今天竞拍美国国库券竞标人所熟悉的一种拍卖形式。这一回，买家不报价，由卖家不断降价，直到有人接受这个价格为止。大部分股票市场，商品市场，外汇市场和衍生产品市场则采用这两种类型的混合模式：买卖双方可以随时宣布他们的竞价或者报价，交易也随时完成，即所谓“连续双向拍卖”。

Mr Cliff's novel idea was to apply his evolutionary¹¹ computer programs to marketplaces themselves. Why not, he thought, try and see what types of auction would let traders converge¹² most quickly towards an equilibrium¹³ price? The results were surprising. In his models, auctions¹⁴ that let buyers and sellers bid at any time like most of today's financial exchanges were less efficient than ones that required relatively¹⁵ more bids from either buyers or sellers. These "evolved auctions" also withstood big market shocks, such as crashes and panics, better than today's real-world versions. Mr Cliff's most recent results, which will be presented in Sydney, Australia, on December 10th, show that the best type of auction for any market depends crucially on even slight differences in the number of buyers and sellers.

克利夫的新思路就是把他研制的可以不断升级的电脑程序应用于市场。他想，为什么不试试看哪种拍卖形式能最快地让交易员趋于一个均衡价格呢？其研究结果令人吃惊。在他的模式中，现今大多数金融交易中采用的让买卖双方随时竞价的拍卖方式比起那些需要买卖双方提出更多竞价的模式效率要低下。这些“进化的拍卖方式”还承受住了大的市场震荡，比如崩盘和恐慌，比真人拍卖表现出色。克利夫将于12月10日在澳大利亚悉尼演示他的最新研究成果，这些成果表明买卖双方人数的轻微差异都会对最好的市场拍卖形式产生影响。

Bank of America has been investigating these new auctions, along with robotic traders, for possible use in electronic exchanges. The hope is that today's financial auctions and online marketplaces might work better by becoming more like their English and Dutch forebears. But what to call such multi-ethnic hybrids¹⁶? Here's introducing the "Cliffhanger".

美洲银行已经开始研究这些新型拍卖形式以及机器人交易员，看看是否可能在电子交易中使用。今天的金融拍卖和网上市场如果能更多地模仿它们的英国和荷兰先祖生意也许就会更好。但这种多种类混合体该叫什么呢？ 叫“克利夫悬疑”如何？