Paper 2013/289

Secure Second Price Auctions with a Rational Auctioneer

Boaz Catane and Amir Herzberg

Abstract

We present novel security requirements for second price auctions and a simple, efficient and practical protocol that provably maintains these requirements. Novel requirements are needed because commonly used requirements, such as the indistinguishability-based secrecy requirement of encryption schemes presented by \cite{goldwasser1982pep}, do not fit properly in the second price auctions context. Additionally, the presented protocol uses a trustworthy supervisor that checks if the auctioneer deviated from the protocol and fines him accordingly. By making sure the expected utility of the auctioneer when deviating from the protocol is lower than his expected utility when abiding by the protocol we ascertain that a {\em rational} auctioneer will abide by the protocol. This allows the supervisor to optimize by performing (computationally-intensive) inspections of the auctioneer with only low probability.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
AuctionsCryptographic Auction SchemesCryptographic ProtocolsVickrey Auctions
Contact author(s)
boaz catane @ mail huji ac il
History
2013-05-26: last of 3 revisions
2013-05-23: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2013/289
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/289,
      author = {Boaz Catane and Amir Herzberg},
      title = {Secure Second Price Auctions with a Rational Auctioneer},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2013/289},
      year = {2013},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/289}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/289}
}
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