Foundations of Platform-Assisted Auctions
Hao Chung, Ke Wu, Elaine Shi

TL;DR
This paper investigates the design of platform-assisted auctions, aiming to create mechanisms where honest bidding and platform integrity are utility-maximizing for all parties, using cryptography to achieve efficient, strategic, and collusion-resistant auctions.
Contribution
It introduces a new model for platform-assisted auctions, explores feasibility and infeasibility results, and proposes cryptographic methods for designing efficient, collusion-resistant auction protocols.
Findings
Cryptography enables efficient platform-assisted auction design.
Strategic service providers can be modeled and analyzed.
New notions like utility-dominated emulation improve protocol efficiency.
Abstract
Today, many auctions are carried out with the help of intermediary platforms like Google and eBay. We refer to such auctions as platform-assisted auctions.Traditionally, the auction theory literature mainly focuses on designing auctions that incentivize the buyers to bid truthfully,assuming that the platform always faithfully implements the auction. In practice, however, the platforms have been found to manipulate the auctions to earn more profit, resulting in high-profile anti-trust lawsuits. We propose a new model for studying platform-assisted auctions in the permissionless setting. We explore whether it is possible to design a dream auction in thisnew model, such that honest behavior is the utility-maximizing strategy for each individual buyer, the platform, the seller, as well as platform-seller or platform-buyer coalitions.Through a collection of feasibility and infeasibility…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAuction Theory and Applications · European and International Contract Law
