Pigs in Cyberspace: A Natural Experiment Testing Differences between Online and Offline Club-Pig Auctions

We find sale prices and net revenues received by sellers in the Midwestern club-pig market are higher at traditional face-to-face auctions than at comparable Internet auctions. The comparison overcomes endogenous selection issues that commonly plague such analyses by using data from sellers that allocated pigs to both markets based on exogenous differences in dates between online and offline auctions. Auction theory suggests that the higher prices and net revenues from traditional auctions are attributable to remaining differences in auction format and buyer characteristics. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.