Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine whether the six independent factors (i.e., the item retail price, the number of bidders, the bidding duration, the shipping cost, the bidder option and the fee return option) could significantly explain the revenue of the auctioneers in one...

In this paper, we empirically study how flagship entry in an online marketplaceaffects consumers, the platform, and various sellers on the platform. We find flagship entry may benefit consumers by expanding the choice set, by intensifying price competition within the entry brand, and by...

We study actual bidding behavior when a new auction format gets introduced into the marketplace. More specifically, we investigate this question using a novel dataset on internet display advertising auctions that exploits a staggered adoption by different publishers (sellers) of first-price...

We study online markets, where two sellers sequentially choose reserve prices and then hold ascending auctions. Buyers can bid in both auctions and can switch between them as frequently as they like. We adapt the revenue equivalence approach of Myerson (1981) to obtain total revenue generated by...

Online advertising often involves targeting ads to certain types of consumers where ads are commonly sold by generalized second price auctions. However, such an auction or mechanism could be considered unfair if similar consumers are consistently shown different ads or consistently receive...

The Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay v. MercExchange seemingly heralded a major change in not only patent law but also copyright law. The Court ruled that injunctions for patent infringement should no longer be granted automatically; instead, plaintiffs must establish the need for...

The paper derives a theoretical model, along with a piece of empirical evidence, of the determination of prices at which a seller sells objects in the "Facebook Group Marketplace" using an adaptive price mechanism and a sequential reverse auction model. This is an informal marketplace and has...

Information generated in online markets can affect both buyers’ and sellers’ expectations and therefore their choices. In this research, we investigate the effect of market information, generated in online auction markets, on buyers’ expectations and choices. To clear large inventories,...

Many online marketplaces offer sponsored product listings as third-party sellers’ ad slots that are blended in organic product listings. A seller’s potential benefit from sponsored listings is a non- trivial question, as a consumer may prefer or avoid advertised products and such preferences...

The economic literature on online auctions is rapidly growing because of the enormous amount of freely available field data. Moreover, numerous innovations in auction-design features on platforms such as eBay have created excellent research opportunities. In this article, we survey the...

This paper explores how a seller should transmit product information to bidders with horizontally differentiated preferences. Under cheap-talk, we show that, in an informative equilibrium, the seller provides less precise information for more popular product attributes. Second, for any given...

One feature of online auctions that has attracted much interest is jump bidding, whereby a bidder raises the price by more than what is needed to become the highest bidder. The effects of jump bidding on the final price remain unclear. Our study involves an in vivo experiment during live...

We use a unique hand collected data set of 6 258 auctions from the online football manager game Hattrick to study micro-patterns of reserve price formation. We find that chosen reserve prices exhibit both, very sophisticated and 'irrational' behavior by the sellers. Reserve prices pick up the...

The innovation of construction procurement by means of electronic reverse auctions is a controversial subject of discussion among both researchers and practitioners. This paper consolidates and critically discusses current knowledge concerning the adoption and use of electronic reverse auctions...

We partnered with a large online auction website to test differing messages' effects on the decision to donate to charity at checkout. Our setting, where impulsive decisions are likely to be driving donations, allows us to evaluate intuitive responses to messages prompting a donation. We find...

Online marketplaces are increasingly adopting innovative business models such as using paid advertising as a major revenue source. We explore the two popular advertising tools, sponsored search and social media endorsement, in attracting web traffic from online sellers' perspective. We estimate...

Many internet firms use A/B tests to make product decisions. In an A/B test, the typical objective is to measure the total average treatment effect (TATE), which measures the difference between the average outcome if all users were treated and the average outcome if all users were untreated....

Much of the prominent literature describing behavior in eBay-like marketplaces emphasizes the successful use of “sniping” agents that wait until the last moments of an auction to bid (truthfully) on behalf of a human user. These agents fare well against “naïve” agents (typically assumed...

In this paper, we estimate the inefficiency in online auctions. Online auctions can be inefficient due to the Internet fraud. A typical example of Internet fraud is when sellers do not send goods to winning bidders even though they have received payment. Therefore, bidders always bear a risk of...

The use and popularity of online auctions is exploding all over the world. Bidding strategies are important because they are related to an auction's final price and ultimately its revenue. This study investigates the bidding strategies adopted by online bidders and the factors of the bidders,...

A marketplace such as Amazon hosts a variety of products by third party sellers and acts as a first party or private label retailer. Assuming an advantage of Amazon in logistics and of sellers in marketing, we investigate whether entry by Amazon is excessive from the point of view of consumers...

In recent years, the rapid development of online marketplaces has not only given rise to co-opetitive relationships between sellers but also to information asymmetry between online marketplaces and sellers. This paper studies information sharing in an e-commerce setting consisting of an online...

Quality certification is a common tool to reduce asymmetric information and enhance trust in marketplaces. Should the certificate focus on seller inputs such as fast shipping, or include output measures such as consumer ratings? In theory, incorporating output measures makes the certificate more...