Electronic auctions with private bids
Michael David Harkavy, J. D. Tygar, Hiroaki Kikuchi · 1998
Auctions are a fundamental electronic commerce technology. We describe a set of protocols for performing sealed-bid electronic auctions which preserve the privacy of the submitted bids using a form of secure distributedcomputation. Bids are never revealed to any party, even after the auction is completed. Both #rst-price and second-price #Vickrey# auctions are supported, and the computational costs of the methods are low enough to allow their use in many real-world auction situations. 1 Introduction Auctions are a fundamental technology for electronic commerce. They have been suggested as a technology for controlling allocation of bandwidth #5, 10# and are increasingly seen on the web. If we could have an ideal auction, what properties mightwe desire? Here are some desiderata #not a complete list# for an ideal auction: # Economic design ---wewant the auction to be designed on solid economic principles and for participants to have incentives to bid as they truly value the item --- t...