Truthful, Credible, and Optimal Auctions for Matroids via Blockchains and Commitments
Aadityan Ganesh, Qianfan Zhang

TL;DR
This paper extends cryptographic auction mechanisms to matroid environments, proving that certain auctions can be truthful, credible, and revenue-optimal using blockchain commitments, with specific modifications for broader settings.
Contribution
It generalizes the Deferred-Revelation Auction to matroid constraints and demonstrates its truthfulness, credibility, and optimality under certain distribution assumptions.
Findings
DRA satisfies truthfulness, credibility, and revenue-optimality for matroids.
DRA is not credible beyond matroids or with smaller deposits.
Modified ADRA achieves bounded communication for arbitrary distributions.
Abstract
We consider a revenue-optimizing auctioneer in single-dimensional environments with matroid feasibility constraints. Akbarpour and Li (2020) argue that any revenue-optimal, truthful, and credible mechanism requires unbounded communication. Recent works (Ferreira and Weinberg, 2020; Essaidi et al., 2022; Chitra et al., 2024) circumvent their impossibility for the single-item setting through the use of cryptographic commitments and blockchains. We extend their results to matroid feasibility constraints. At a high level, the two-round Deferred-Revelation Auction (DRA) discussed by Ferreira and Weinberg (2020) and Chitra et al., (2024) requires each bidder to submit a deposit, which is slashed upon presenting verifiable evidence indicating a deviation from the behaviour prescribed by the mechanism. We prove that the DRA satisfies truthfulness, credibility and revenue-optimality for all…
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