A Secure Multi-Attribute Auction Model

Internet auction not only is an integral part of electronic commerce but also has become a promising field for applying autonomous agents and multi-agent system (MAS) technologies. Meanwhile, auction, as an efficient resource allocation method, has important application in decentralized scheduling problems and MAS problems, such as coalition formation and has received more and more attention among scholars. Multi-attribute consideration for a resource should be a common phenomenon in an auction; however, it has received decreasing levels of attention. Also, the secure mechanisms and privacy of an auction are important aspects in implementing an auction. A general auction model is given and a Vickrey-type multi-attribute auction model is studied. For trust problems among participants in an auction, in this model, a mobile agent is introduced for a decentralized implementation during the auction. Furthermore, a secure two-party computation protocol is introduced for the privacy demand of bidding. Finally, a secure protocol named SVAMA comes out for the model. SVAMA has some useful properties like strategy-proof, false-name proof, Pareto efficient, etc. The model presented in this paper is more general compared with the existing multi-attribute auction models, and has a dominant strategy for sellers, also has the property of false-name proof. These characteristics are the improvements for the existing multi-attribute auction methods, improving the work of Esther David, Felix Brandt, et al.