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 co-present. 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, the authors present an on-line English auction in which bids are processed fairly and the auction closes fairly without specialized trusted parties i.e., there is no need to trust the auctioneer to obtain a fair outcome to the auction.