Emotional Bidders — An Analytical and Experimental Examination of Consumers\u27 Behavior in Reverse Action

E-commerce has proved to be fertile ground for new business models, which may be patented (for up to 20 years) and have potentially far-reaching impact on the e-commerce landscape. One such electronic market is the reverse-auction model popularized by Priceline.com. There is still uncertainty surrounding the survival of such new electronic markets currently available on the Internet. Understanding user behavior is necessary for better assessment of these sites\u27 survival. This paper adds to economic analysis a formal representation of the emotions evoked by the auction process, specifically, the excitement of winning if a bid is accepted, and the frustration of losing if it is not. We generate and empirically test a number of insights related to (1) the impact of expected excitement at winning, and frustration at losing, on bids across consumers and biddings scenarios; and (2) the dynamic nature of the bidding behavior—that is, how winning and losing in previous bids influence their future bidding behavior

My Reputation Always Had More Fun Than Me: The Failure of eBay\u27s Feedback Model to Effectively Prevent Online Auction Fraud

Online auctions for goods are currently a popular and lucrative form of e-commerce, but present special problems of trust and fraud prevention, because most deals involve buyers and sellers who do not know each other and are separated by distance. Online auctions for goods have been largely unregulated by formal laws. For that reason, trust-building and fraud prevention have primarily been accomplished through creative private regulatory models implemented by the auction houses themselves. This Comment examines one popular model, a registration and feedback system pioneered by the leading online auction company, eBay. Under this system, a user builds a public online reputation over time by engaging in a number of transactions and receiving public feedback from his transaction partners. By checking a potential transaction partner\u27s feedback file, a user can theoretically receive information about that party\u27s honesty and trustworthiness, and make an informed decision about transacting with that person. However, as this Comment will show, the growth of the user community has rendered this community policing model increasingly unreliable and unable to prevent bad behavior, although the model still has some psychological benefits. Therefore, eBay cannot rely on feedback systems to reliably prevent fraud, and must implement other forms of regulation (some of which are discussed in this Comment) or face being externally regulated by government entities

Use of Auctions in Spectrum Awards

In my thesis I explore how to best award spectrum licenses to mobile network operators. During the last twenty years governments have shifted their preferred method of awarding spectrum from comparative awards to auctions. The praised VCG mechanism does not apply well to auctioning spectrum and instead simultaneous multiple round auction, clock auction, and combinatorial clock auction models are used. These models have flaws causing bidders to lack an unambiguous dominant strategy and practice demand reduction. Each spectrum auction is different and there exists no one-size-fits-all solution. Thus, the auction design process carries tremendous weight when attempting to organize a successful spectrum award

Cyber Commodification

When it comes to commodification on the Internet, it is a wild, wild World Wide Web. Researching encyclopedia articles for Wikipedia is an unpaid labor of love, but connecting to your friends on Facebook is a $100 billion enterprise. Newspaper classified advertisements are definitely commercial, but their equivalent on Craigslist was mostly non-commercial – until the Delaware Chancery Court stepped in. Selling your organs is prohibited in the United States, whereas selling hair promises to rescue third-world citizens from poverty. Selling sex is illegal as prostitution, but selling adultery online is a hot new business model. And a small company offering a free service to academics has quietly become the dominant method for disseminating academic legal research, quietly beating massive commercial data providers without anyone initially noticing. This Article explores these and other recent developments by discussing the challenging legal issues raised by Internet commodification of what is often unpaid labor

EVALUATING THE IMPACTS OF AUCTION BIDDING RESTRICTIONS ON CONSUMER SURPLUS AND BEHAVIORS - AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF ONLINE PENNY AUCTIONS.

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Measuring Emotions in Electronic Auctions

This book develops a structured methodology that allows to systematically analyze emotions in auctions. It provides a unified framework for emotional bidding in auctions, which comprises the bidders\u27 processes of cognitive reasoning and emotional processing, and a methodology for measuring physiological correlates of human emotional processing in economic experiments is proposed: physioeconomics. Finally, an experiment is presented which investigates the impact of clock speeds in Dutch auctions

Understanding and Supporting Decision-Making in Electronic Auctions: A NeuroIS Approach

Making use of the potential of NeuroIS, I apply a NeuroIS approach in this thesis to further the understanding of decision-making and to analyze the opportunities for NeuroIS in decision-support, both in electronic auctions