  We study how to enable auctions in the big data context to solve many
upcoming data-based decision problems in the near future. We consider the
characteristics of the big data including, but not limited to, velocity,
volume, variety, and veracity, and we believe any auction mechanism design in
the future should take the following factors into consideration: 1) generality
(variety); 2) efficiency and scalability (velocity and volume); 3) truthfulness
and verifiability (veracity). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving
construction for auction mechanism design in the big data, which prevents
adversaries from learning unnecessary information except those implied in the
valid output of the auction. More specifically, we considered one of the most
general form of the auction (to deal with the variety), and greatly improved
the the efficiency and scalability by approximating the NP-hard problems and
avoiding the design based on garbled circuits (to deal with velocity and
volume), and finally prevented stakeholders from lying to each other for their
own benefit (to deal with the veracity). We achieve these by introducing a
novel privacy-preserving winner determination algorithm and a novel payment
mechanism. Additionally, we further employ a blind signature scheme as a
building block to let bidders verify the authenticity of their payment reported
by the auctioneer. The comparison with peer work shows that we improve the
asymptotic performance of peer works' overhead from the exponential growth to a
linear growth and from linear growth to a logarithmic growth, which greatly
improves the scalability.
