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Regular Paper

A Blockchain-Based Protocol for Malicious Price Discrimination

School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230000, China
Information Department, the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou 215000, China
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Abstract

Serious price discrimination emerges with the development of big data and mobile networks, which harms the interests of consumers. To solve this problem, we propose a blockchain-based price consensus protocol to solve the malicious price discrimination faced by consumers. We give a mathematical definition of price discrimination, which requires the system to satisfy consistency and timeliness. The distributed blockchain can make the different pricing of merchants transparent to consumers, thus satisfying the consistency. The aging window mechanism of our protocol ensures that there is no disagreement between any node on the consensus on price or price discrimination within a fixed period, which meets the timeliness. Moreover, we evaluate its performance through a prototype implementation and experiments with up to 100 user nodes. Experimental results show that our protocol achieves all the expected goals like price transparency, consistency, and timeliness, and it additionally guarantees the consensus of the optimal price with a high probability.

Keywords

blockchaindigital economydistributed applicationprice discriminationprice transparency

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Journal of Computer Science and Technology
Volume 37 Issue 1,
January 2022
Pages 266-276
DOI: 10.1007/s11390-021-0583-x
Cite this article:
Xue L-D, Liu Y-J, Yang W, et al. A Blockchain-Based Protocol for Malicious Price Discrimination. Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2022, 37(1): 266-276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-021-0583-x

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Received: 06 May 2020
Accepted: 29 December 2021
Published: 31 January 2022
©Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 2022
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