The art market, following the example of financial markets, is divided into a primary market, where works are traded directly from artists, and a secondary market that is mainly the auction market. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and galloping inflation have influenced the creation of a bull...

Although millions of hectares of public land are transferred to private parties each year, often with unsatisfactory results, evidence on mechanisms to achieve better outcomes is scant. This paper analyzes the impact of a 2021 reform in Ukraine that -after earlier digitization efforts did not...

The size distribution of firms is an important indicator of market concentration. Studying the distribution of sales for eBay’s commercial sellers, this paper provides the first analysis of a firm size distribution (FSD) at an online market, further examining its evolution, and the underlying...

This study investigates the reference price effect of historical price lists - which are provided in the auction description - on ending prices. This paper estimates and compares three different theories for the reference price effect of price lists: adaptation-level theory, range theory and...

This paper performs a forensic analysis of eBay’s transfer pricing cost sharing arrangement based on forensic economic analysis of public information, including eBay’s SEC and foreign country regulatory filings, court proceedings, case studies, published materials containing insider accounts...

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...

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...

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...

This paper surveys recent studies of Internet auctions. Four main areas of research are summarized. First, economists have documented strategic bidding in these markets and attempted to understand why sniping, or bidding at the last second, occurs. Second, some researchers have measured...

Little research has been conducted on a common phenomenon in today’s online environment: the concurrent selling of identical products in online auctions. To fill this gap, the current research proposes a game-theoretical model to analyze the seller’s optimal strategy for selling two...

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...

Bargaining breakdown—whether as delay, conflict, or missing trade—plagues bargaining in environments with incomplete information. Can a bargaining environment that facilitates or restricts communication alleviate these costs? We exploit a unique opportunity to study this question using real...

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...

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,...

This study provides a structural analysis of detailed, alternating-offer bargaining data from eBay, deriving bounds on buyers and sellers private value distributions using a range of assumptions on behavior. These assumptions range from very weak (assuming only that acceptance and rejection...

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...

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 novel dataset on more than 35,000 eBay auctions for electronics to analyse Covid19-induced lockdown effects. The dataset covers pre- and lockdown periods and, for each auction, contains both auction settings fixed by the seller and the whole bidding record. The interplay of agents...

Problem definition: Dynamic forecasting models in auctions have fallen short on two dimensions: (i) the lack of an equilibrium model for final stage bids and (ii) the lack of a winner's curse (i.e., a tendency to overpay conditional on winning the auction) adjustment to allow bidders to account...