Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Online auction frauds, representing the largest part of all Internet frauds, are on the rise because auctions are vulnerable to opportunistic behaviors. Thus, auctions are considered trust-critical systems. Trust is difficult to establish because transactions occur among complete strangers. Nowadays auctions are facing serious frauds including: bid shilling, sniping and shielding, auctioneer cheating, auctioneer-bidder cheating and lack of privacy of submitted bids especially the losing ones. Shilling and auctioneer cheating are the hardest types of frauds to detect. These problems, reported in existing auction houses, make auctions really unfair and unreliable. To increase trust in auctions and overcome the problems listed above, we want to develop a trustworthy online auction house for multi-attribute reverse auctions, i.e. in the context of competing sellers and multiple attributes to describe the products being auctioned. All existing work on trust management for auctions concerns forward auctions, i.e. with competing buyers, and price-only auctions which are simple and cannot be used in many real-world situations. Our trustworthy multi-attribute reverse auction house is composed of the following components:(1) a new mechanism for Internet auctions that copes with sniping, shielding, auctioneer cheating and lack of privacy problems; (2) a real-time fraud detection system that detects at run time two cheating activities: shilling and outbidding; (3) a real-time trust evaluation system that dynamically computes the trust scores of sellers; (4) a framework that evaluates the fairness of our auction protocol, and (5) a matchmaking system that searches for the best sellers' products that match the buyer's request. The matched sellers who have acceptable trust values are then invited to the auction. We will utilize game theory to model the rules of our negotiation protocol and verify desirable theoretical properties, formal methods to be able to realize the activities of components (2) and (4), and multi-agent technology to design, implement and simulate each component of our auction house.