Robust Multi-unit Auction Protocol against False-name Bids
Makoto Yokoo, Yuko Sakurai, and Shigeo Matsubara
17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(IJCAI-2001),2001.
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 pre-determine 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.