Papers for

financial exchange operators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Cryptographic methods ensure truthful auctions despite abort risks

Credible AUctions via MPC Gadgets: Bounding Information Leakage Under Abort

Abstract: The design of credible auctions---mechanisms where a revenue-maximizing auctioneer has no incentive to deviate from the protocol---faces a fundamental cryptographic barrier when the auctioneer controls shill bidders. While a natural approach is to use Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to remove the trusted auctioneer, the impossibility of fair coin flipping of Cleve (1986) implies that monolithic MPC protocols grant the auctioneer a "free option": they can learn the auction's outcome and unilaterally abort if the revenue is unsatisfactory. Cryptographic commitments with ex-ante penalties mitigate this abort asymmetry, but no finite penalty suffices for heavy-tailed distributions. We circumvent this barrier by introducing the MPC Decomposition Principle. Rather than encrypting the entire mechanism, we use MPC strictly as an information-restriction tool. We isolate the winner determination problem into a minimal MPC gadget that computes and reveals the winner's identity but no payment information. This qualitative restriction mathematically bounds the information leaked upon an abort. By combining this gadget with sequential revelation and finite economic penalties, we design the Sequential Revelation Auction (SRA). We prove that bounding the information leakage strictly bounds the value of the free option, showing that a penalty of $k \geq \sum_{i=1}^n Rev(F_i)$ is sufficient for credibility, and tight: for equal-revenue distributions, every smaller penalty admits a profitable deviation. Using constant-round MPC, the SRA resolves an open question of Akbarpour and Li (2020) and Ferreira and Weinberg (2020) by providing a constant-round, incentive-compatible, revenue-optimal credible auction for all product distributions with vanishing revenue tails

Wed 23 SeptComputer Science and Game TheoryCryptography and Security
The gist
Traditional online auctions can be manipulated by the auctioneer, who might quit the process if the outcome is bad for them. The authors show that using secure computation only for deciding who wins, but not how much to pay, limits what information can be leaked if the auctioneer aborts. They combine this with penalties for aborting and revealing bids one step at a time to create an auction that is both truthful and discourages quitting early. Their method guarantees the auctioneer gains no advantage by deviating, under realistic conditions.
Open → 2609.27402v1