Privacy Preserving Auctions

Ran Eilat, Kfir Eliaz and Xiaosheng Mu

No 18662, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: In many auction settings the auctioneer must disclose the identity of the winner and the price he pays. We characterize the auction that minimizes the winner's privacy loss among those that maximize total surplus or the seller's revenue, and are strategy-proof. Privacy loss is measured with respect to what an outside observer learns from the disclosed price, and is quantified by the mutual information between the price and the winner's willingness to pay. When only interim individual-rationality is required, the most privacy preserving auction involves stochastic ex-post payments. Under ex-post individual rationality, it is the second-price auction with deterministic payments.

JEL-codes: D44 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18662 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:18662

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18662
orders@cepr.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (repec@cepr.org).