Foundations of platform-assisted auctions (Q6863968)

It is known that, 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.\N\NIn this paper a new model for studying platform-assisted auctions in the permissionless setting, where anyone can register and participate in the auction is proposed. More precisely the authors show how cryptography can lend to the design of an efficient platform-assisted auction with dream properties. A new notion of simulation called utility-dominated emulation that is sufficient for guaranteeing the game-theoretic properties needed in an auction is proposed. Under this new notion of simulation, the authors show how to design efficient auction protocols with quasilinear efficiency, which gives an \(n\)-fold improvement over any generic approach where \(n\) is the number of buyers.\N\NFor the entire collection see [Zbl 08084026].