Fair On-Line Auctions without Special Trusted Parties

Traditional face-to-face (English) auctions rely on the auctioneer to fairly interact with bidders to accept the highest bid on behalf of the seller. On-line auctions also require fair negotiation. However, unlike face-to-face auctions, on-line auctions are inherently subject to attacks because the bidders and auctioneer are not copresent. These attacks include selectively blocking bids based on the bidder and amount and selectively closing the auction after a particular bid is received. In this paper, we present an on-line English auction in which bids are processed fairly and the auction closes fairly without specialized trusted parties. In particular, there is no need to trust the auctioneer to obtain a fair outcome to the auction.

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