The simplest means of resolving a dispute is for the auctioneers to send all components to a trusted authority. The accuracy of the components can be verified by the signatures, and then the precise bid can be determined. The drawback of this method of resolution is that the authority will learn the exact value of the bid. However, for the auctioneers to inaccurately determine a winner, there must be a coalition of auctioneers large enough to determine the bid themselves, each member of which is corrupt or faulty. So the bid may already be known to the corrupt auctioneers.
Another method for resolving such a dispute is to perform a greatly
simplified version of the auction. This simplified auction may be
performed as a check by the auctioneers, to ensure that the winner was
not selected incorrectly. Additionally, the shares possessed by
the auctioneers (signed by the bidder) may be transferred to some
other distributed authority, which will perform the check to resolve
disputes. This simplified auction is performed with 3 bids: the
disputed ``winning'' bid and two known bids and
(where
is the selling price determined by the disputed auction). If
this auction returns a selling price of
, then the auction was
correct; if it returns a selling price of
, it was incorrect.
The result of the auction is always
or
and thus reveals
no information other than whether the questioned bid is less than
.