More Generalizations

• Auctions can not only take the form of single seller and multiple buyers, but also single buyer and multiple sellers, or multiple sellers and multiple buyers. All these types can very easily fit in the framework of SAM.
• The bidding can not only be held within a given period of time, but also be continuous. Sellers and bidders send in their strategies into SAM. Information about currently available resources can be updated periodically, i.e. every second or every five minutes. Participants can also change their strategies if needed, for example, if a new demand pattern appears. SAM is essential for carrying out this type of auction, because first, strategies reside in SAM and hence can be evaluated efficiently and eliminate the round-trip time for publishing information and submitting bids as inevitable in traditional solution; second, SAM can physically be integrated at anywhere including malicious places and environment that is harmful for human being.
• The SAM can ensure that auction specs enforce rules such as: a minimum number of bids must occur before an auction can be executed, or a receipt must be received from some number of authenticated advertising sources.
• The SAM can require that sellers submit an (encrypted) ``evidence of ability to provide service in question.''
• Anomaly Detection
  • A SAM can execute anomaly or fraud detection algorithms on the otherwise anonymous data at an auction or sequence of auctions.
  • Networks of SAMs, even for different auctioneers, can jointly and possibly concurrently execute these algorithms. They can be used to detect wide-range fraud. For example, in critical resources such as electricity power, such SAM group can be used to detect when some single buyer wants to buy all the resources and then become a monopoly to gain profit. Some similar enforcement policy can be deployed to prevent fraud while preserve desired secrecy and privacy of legitimate participants.
• The auction spec can be constructed so that the existence (and perhaps trustworthiness, as witnessed by some appropriate party) of these algorithms is indicated, but the details of the algorithms remain secret.