Robust multi-unit auction protocol against false-name bids

  • Authors:

  • Makoto Yokoo;Yuko Sakurai;Shigeo Matsubara

  • Affiliations:

  • NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan;NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan;NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'01 Proceedings of the 17th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

This paper presents a new multi-unit auction protocol (IR protocol) that is robust against false-name bids. Internet auctions have become an integral part of Electronic Commerce and a promising field for applying agent and Artificial Intelligence technologies. Although the Internet provides an excellent infrastructure for executing auctions, the possibility of a new type of cheating called false-name bids has been pointed out. A false-name bid is a bid submitted under a fictitious name. A protocol called LDS has been developed for combinatorial auctions of multiple different items and has proven to be robust against false-name bids. Although we can modify the LDS protocol to handle multi-unit auctions, in which multiple units of an identical item are auctioned, the protocol is complicated and requires the auctioneer to carefully predetermine the combination of bundles to obtain a high social surplus or revenue. For the auctioneer, our newly developed IR protocol is easier to use than the LDS, since the combination of bundles is automatically determined in a flexible manner according to the declared evaluation values of agents. The evaluation results show that the IR protocol can obtain a better social surplus than that obtained by the LDS protocol.