Effcient Implementation and Computational Analysis of Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Securing the Financial Markets

Auctions are a key economic mechanism for establishing the value of goods
that have an uncertain price. In recent years, as a consequence of the ubiquitous
emergence of technology, auctions can reach consumers, and as a result drive market
prices, on a global scale. Collection of private information such as past trades exposes
more information than desired by market participants. The leaked information can be
statistically analyzed to provide auctioneers, or competitors, an advantage on future
transactions. The need to preserve privacy has become a critical concern to reach
an accepted level of fairness, and to provide market participants an environment in
which they can bid a true valuation. This research is about possible mechanisms
to carry out sealed-bid auctions in a distributed setting, and provides the reader
with the challenges that currently persevere in the field. The first chapter offers an
introduction to different kinds of auction, and to describe sealed-bid auction. The
next chapter surveys the literature, and provides necessary theoretical background.
Moving on to chapter 3, instead of solely focusing on theoretical aspects of sealed-bid
auctions, this chapter dives into implementation details, and demonstrates through
communication and computational analysis how different settings affect performance.