This paper presents five empirical tests of the popular modeling abstraction that assumes bids from online auctions with proxy bidding can be analyzed “as if” they were bids from a second price sealed-bid auction. The tests rely on observations of the magnitudes and timings of the top two...

Reverse pricing is a market mechanism under which a consumer's bid for a product leads to a sale if the bid exceeds a hidden acceptance threshold the seller has set in advance. The seller faces two key decisions in designing such a mechanism: First, he must decide where in the process to collect...