Analyzing the Privacy of a Vickrey Auction Mechanism

Ismael Rodriguez and Natalia Lopez
Additional contact information
Ismael Rodriguez: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Natalia Lopez: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

International Journal of E-Business Research (IJEBR), 2006, vol. 2, issue 3, 17-27

Abstract: This article studies the properties of a distributed mechanism to perform the Vickrey auction. This mechanism, which was originally presented in López, Núñez, Rodríguez, and Rubio (2004), has the main characteristic that most of the information concerning the bids is kept private for both bidders and the auctioneer without the necessity of any trusted third party. In particular, after the auction is finished, only the value of the second-highest bid and the identity of the highest bidder are publicly revealed. However, in that paper, several questions about the applicability of the protocol were left unanswered. In particular, no implementation was provided. Besides, the analysis of the collusion risk was too brief. In this paper, we address these issues in a deeper way. Let us note that, as it is stated in Brandt and Sandholm (2004), it is impossible to create a completely private mechanism to perform the Vickrey auction. In particular, we identify a gap between the proposed protocol and the complete privacy: If any n-2 bidders and the winning bidder collude, the privacy is lost. Besides, some privacy properties can be broken by chance if some specific situations appear, though the probability of this threat decreases as the number of bidders increases. In addition, we present and analyze a simple implementation of the protocol, and we consider its practical applicability.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve. ... 4018/jebr.2006070102 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igg:jebr00:v:2:y:2006:i:3:p:17-27

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of E-Business Research (IJEBR) is currently edited by Mohammad Nabil Almunawar

More articles in International Journal of E-Business Research (IJEBR) from IGI Global
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journal Editor ().