A Differentially Private Auction Mechanism in Online Social Networks

The growing popularity of users in online social network gives a big opportunity for online auction. The famous Information Diffusion Mechanism (IDM) is an excellent method even meet the incentive compatibility and individual rationality. Although the existing auction in online social network has considered the buyers’ information which is not known by the seller, current mechanism still can not preserve the privacy information of users in online social network. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism based on the IDM and differential privacy. Our mechanism can successfully process the auction and at the same time preserve clients’ price information from neighbours. We achieved these by adding virtual nodes to each node and Laplace noise for its price in the auction process. We also formulate this mechanism on the real network and the random network, scale-free network to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed mechanism. The evaluation shows that the result of our methods only depend on the noise added to the agents. It is independent from the agents’ original price.