PBS: Private Bartering Systems

Barter trade is a growing part of the world economy. Hundreds of thousands of companies in the US alone participate in barter. Barter is also used in other domains, such as resource management in distributed systems. Existing algorithms for finding barter trades require that values of goods are publicly known (whether they are set by a global function or individual utility functions for each user). The fact that each user must reveal her utility function in order to find barter trades is a potential disincentive to using bartering. We present a first step in the creation of a privacy-preserving bartering system. We present algorithms and privacy-preserving protocols in the honest but curious model for determining the existence of win-win trades (and algorithms and protocols for finding such trades). We discuss a number of remaining open problems and extensions for future work.

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