Online Auctions

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 theoretical, empirical, and experimental research on bidder strategies (including the timing of bids and winner's-curse effects) and seller strategies (including reserve-price policies and the use of buy-now options) in online auctions, as well as some of the literature dealing with online-auction design (including stopping rules and multi-object pricing rules).

Economics-driven approach for self-securing assets in cloud

This thesis proposes the engineering of an elastic self-adaptive security solution for the Cloud that considers assets as independent entities, with a need for customised, ad-hoc security. The solution exploits agent-based, market-inspired methodologies and learning approaches for managing the changing security requirements of assets by considering the shared and on-demand nature of services and resources while catering for monetary and computational constraints. The usage of auction procedures allows the proposed framework to deal with the scale of the problem and the trade-offs that can arise between users and Cloud service provider(s). Whereas, the usage of a learning technique enables our framework to operate in a proactive, automated fashion and to arrive on more efficient bidding plans, informed by historical data. A variant of the proposed framework, grounded on a simulated university application environment, was developed to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of this solution. As the proposed solution is grounded on market methods, this thesis is also concerned with asserting the dependability of market mechanisms. We follow an experimentally driven approach to demonstrate the deficiency of existing market-oriented solutions in facing common market-specific security threats and provide candidate, lightweight defensive mechanisms for securing them against these attacks

A Comparison of Bidding Strategies for Online Auctions Using Fuzzy Reasoning and Negotiation Decision Functions

© 1993-2012 IEEE. Bidders often feel challenged when looking for the best bidding strategies to excel in the competitive environment of multiple and simultaneous online auctions for same or similar items. Bidders face complicated issues for deciding which auction to participate in, whether to bid early or late, and how much to bid. In this paper, we present the design of bidding strategies, which aim to forecast the bid amounts for buyers at a particular moment in time based on their bidding behavior and their valuation of an auctioned item. The agent develops a comprehensive methodology for final price estimation, which designs bidding strategies to address buyers' different bidding behaviors using two approaches: Mamdani method with regression analysis and negotiation decision functions. The experimental results show that the agents who follow fuzzy reasoning with a regression approach outperform other existing agents in most settings in terms of their success rate and expected utility

Emergent Behavior and Criticality in Online Auctions

The present work studies eBay online auctions as a complex system, where agents in form of sellers and bidders interact in a large number. In contrast to unintelligent agents of physical systems, humans have the choice between different possible rational strategies. The empirical findings in this work are the result of statistical analysis of two major sets of data with more than 200,000 auctions. Probability distribution functions and relations between different variables are studied. Statistical analysis of the eBay data shows that the probability density functions for a wide range of quantities follow rather simple functionalities like exponential and power laws. Similar power-law distributions were observed in physics when studying the behavior of systems at their critical points, related to second order phase transitions. Although lots of relations and distributions could be understood qualitatively and quantitatively, there exists, up to now, no unifying model, which describes all of the observations. As an application we have found that a kind of fraud known as shill bidding leads to significant deviations from the average behavior. eBay regarded as a complex system seems to have features of totally stochastic processes, irrational agents and fully rational agents altogether

Auctions and bidding: A guide for computer scientists

There is a veritable menagerie of auctions-single-dimensional, multi-dimensional, single-sided, double-sided, first-price, second-price, English, Dutch, Japanese, sealed-bid-and these have been extensively discussed and analyzed in the economics literature. The main purpose of this article is to survey this literature from a computer science perspective, primarily from the viewpoint of computer scientists who are interested in learning about auction theory, and to provide pointers into the economics literature for those who want a deeper technical understanding. In addition, since auctions are an increasingly important topic in computer science, we also look at work on auctions from the computer science literature. Overall, our aim is to identifying what both these bodies of work these tell us about creating electronic auctions. © 2011 ACM.This work was funded in part by HP under the “Always on” grant, by NSF IIS-0329037 “Tools and Techniques for Automated Mechanism Design”, and by IEA (TIN2006-15662-C02-01), OK (IST-4-027253-STP), eREP(EC-FP6-CIT5-28575) and Agreement Technologies (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010).Peer Reviewe