Boxiang Fu | Searcharxiv

arXiv2023

Increasing Ticketing Allocative Efficiency Using Marginal Price Auction Theory

Most modern ticketing systems rely on a first-come-first-serve or randomized allocation system to determine the allocation of tickets. Such systems has received considerable backlash in recent years due to its inequitable allotment and allocative inefficiency. We analyze a ticketing protocol based on a variation of the marginal price auction system. Users submit bids to the protocol based on their own utilities. The protocol awards tickets to the highest bidders and determines the final ticket price paid by all bidders using the lowest winning submitted bid. Game theoretic proof is provided to ensure the protocol more efficiently allocates the tickets to the bidders with the highest utilities. We also prove that the protocol extracts more economic rents for the event organizers and the non-optimality of ticket scalping under time-invariant bidder utilities.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

Proof-of-work consensus by quantum sampling

Since its advent in 2011, boson sampling has been a preferred candidate for demonstrating quantum advantage because of its simplicity and near-term requirements compared to other quantum algorithms. We propose to use a variant, called coarse-grained boson-sampling (CGBS), as a quantum Proof-of-Work (PoW) scheme for blockchain consensus. The users perform boson sampling using input states that depend on the current block information and commit their samples to the network. Afterwards, CGBS strategies are determined which can be used to both validate samples and reward successful miners. By combining rewards for miners committing honest samples together with penalties for miners committing dishonest samples, a Nash equilibrium is found that incentivizes honest nodes. We provide numerical evidence that these validation tests are hard to spoof classically without knowing the binning scheme ahead of time and show the robustness of our protocol to small partial distinguishability of photons. The scheme works for both Fock state boson sampling and Gaussian boson sampling and provides dramatic speedup and energy savings relative to computation by classical hardware.

quant-ph↗