Online auctions efficiency: a survey of ebay auctions

Online auctions have become a pervasive transaction mechanism for e-commerce. As the largest online marketplace in the world, eBay is an attractive case study that enables the study of online auctions utilizing data involving real people and transactions. In this paper, we present a detailed investigation and analysis of multiple online auction properties including: consumer surplus, sniping, bidding strategy and their crossrelationships. Our goal is to evaluate the theoretical foundations of online auctions and discover patterns and behaviors hidden due to the lack of real and extensive transaction data. Among our findings, we uncover an important correlation among sniping and high surplus ratios, which implies the uncertainty of true value in a competitive environment. The key issue is the wrong assumption that bidders' valuations are independent from each other, which leads to inefficient auctions. In order to address the inefficiencies of current online formats we introduce a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Wenyan Hu, Alvaro Bolivar
• Keywords: Auctions Utilizing Data, Internet Technology, Online Auction Properties, Online Auctions, WWW 2008