Truthful Transaction Protocol for E-Commerce Networks Based on Double Auction

Abstract

With the prosperous development of e-commerce, customized products have gradually become an important part of online transactions, opening up a new promising market for traditional e-commerce. However, mainstream transaction networks do not provide efficient support to transactions of customized products, thus failing to meet the personalized needs of customers, and pricing strategies are usually dominated by sellers, leading to loss of customers' interests. To overcome these problems, we propose an efficient truthful transaction protocol for e-commerce networks, called ETTP. First, we design a screening algorithm to achieve on-demand selection of transaction participants in hierarchical network domains before transaction initiation. This screening algorithm is customer-oriented and offers personalized commodities by preventing unqualified sellers from participating in the transaction. Furthermore, we develop the ETTP-Auction algorithm based on double auction to improve the transaction efficiency. ETTP-Auction inherently ensures the participation of buyers in pricing and protects their interests. Finally, we prove theoretically that ETTP-Auction satisfies the four economic properties (individual rationality, incentive compatibility, budget balance, and computational efficiency) and verify the performance of the proposed method through simulations. Our ETTP protocol achieves significantly higher system performance, reduces communication overhead, and features better scalability compared with benchmark methods.