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To be or not to be an auctioneer: Some thoughts on the legal nature of online eBay auctions and the protection of consumers
This paper discusses the legal classification of online “eBay” auctions. The discussion has key implications on the scope of consumer protection law as sale by auctions are, for example, excluded from the scope of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000. The paper uncovers that online “eBay” auctions cannot always be considered as traditional auctions and that eBay, as an intermediary, is not to be considered as an auctioneer. This creates difficulties associated with a distributive application of consumer protection laws such as the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000. Another set of difficulties is associated with a lenient legal regime applicable to the liability of eBay under the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 . The paper concludes that there is an urgent need to clarify the legal classification of online auctions and to rethink the liability of online auction sites to better protect consumers
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).
Bidding Behavior in Competing Auctions: Evidence from eBay
Much of the existing auction literature treats auctions as running independently of one another, with each bidder choosing to participate in only one auction. However, in many online auctions, a number of substitutable goods are auctioned concurrently and bidders can bid on several auctions at the same time. Recent theoretical research shows how bidders can gain from the existence of competing auctions, the current paper providing the first empirical evidence in support of competing auctions theory using online auctions data from eBay. Our results indicate that a significant proportion of bidders do bid across competing auctions and that bidders tend to submit bids on auctions with the lowest standing bid, as the theory predicts. The paper also shows that winning bidders who cross-bid pay lower prices on average than winning bidders who do not.Competing Auction, Cross-Bidding, Auction Empirics
Internet Auctions: Description, Bidders' Profiles and Implications
The increasing quantity of items bough and sold over the internet led to the success of internet auctions, to the introduction of new auction rules and the creation of new businesses and merger among existing ones. In this paper, we present a description of existing internet auction rules and typical profile of consumers who use them. We found that bidders are most likely located in the U.S., have some internet experience and skills and that they belong to the 26-50 years old age group. We also discuss the implication of online auctions on resource allocation.Internet Auctions, Online Auctions
Trust and Experience in Online Auctions
This paper aims to shed light on the complexities and difficulties in predicting the effects of trust and the experience of online auction participants on bid levels in online auctions. To provide some insights into learning by bidders, a field study was conducted first to examine auction and bidder characteristics from eBay auctions of rare coins. We proposed that such learning is partly because of institutional-based trust. Data were then gathered from 453 participants in an online experiment and survey, and a structural equation model was used to analyze the results. This paper reveals that experience has a nonmonotonic effect on the levels of online auction bids. Contrary to previous research on traditional auctions, as online auction bidders gain more experience, their level of institutional-based trust increases and leads to higher bid levels. Data also show that both a bidder’s selling and bidding experiences increase bid levels, with the selling experience having a somewhat stronger effect. This paper offers an in-depth study that examines the effects of experience and learning and bid levels in online auctions. We postulate this learning is because of institutional-based trust. Although personal trust in sellers has received a significant amount of research attention, this paper addresses an important gap in the literature by focusing on institutional-based trust
Buy-It-Now prices in eBay Auctions - The Field in the Lab
Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a good prior to the auction. Even though, buyer behavior is well studied in Buy-It-Now auctions, as to this point little is known about how sellers set Buy-It-Now prices. We investigate into this question by analyzing seller behavior in Buy-It-Now auctions. More precisely, we combine the use of a real online auction market (the eBay platform and eBay traders) with the techniques of lab experiments. We find a striking link between the information about agents provided by the eBay market institution and their behavior. Information about buyers is correlated with their deviation from true value bidding. Sellers respond strategically to this information when deciding on their Buy-It-Now prices. Thus, our results highlight potential economic consequences of information publicly available in (online) market institutions
The Timing of Bid Placement and Extent of Multiple Bidding: An Empirical Investigation Using eBay Online Auctions
Online auctions are fast gaining popularity in today's electronic commerce.
Relative to offline auctions, there is a greater degree of multiple bidding and
late bidding in online auctions, an empirical finding by some recent research.
These two behaviors (multiple bidding and late bidding) are of ``strategic''
importance to online auctions and hence important to investigate. In this
article we empirically measure the distribution of bid timings and the extent
of multiple bidding in a large set of online auctions, using bidder experience
as a mediating variable. We use data from the popular auction site
\url{www.eBay.com} to investigate more than 10,000 auctions from 15 consumer
product categories. We estimate the distribution of late bidding and multiple
bidding, which allows us to place these product categories along a continuum of
these metrics (the extent of late bidding and the extent of multiple bidding).
Interestingly, the results of the analysis distinguish most of the product
categories from one another with respect to these metrics, implying that
product categories, after controlling for bidder experience, differ in the
extent of multiple bidding and late bidding observed in them. We also find a
nonmonotonic impact of bidder experience on the timing of bid placements.
Experienced bidders are ``more'' active either toward the close of auction or
toward the start of auction. The impact of experience on the extent of multiple
bidding, though, is monotonic across the auction interval; more experienced
bidders tend to indulge ``less'' in multiple bidding.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000123 in the
Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Buy-It-Now prices in eBay Auctions - The Field in the Lab
Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a good prior to the auction. Even though, buyer behavior is well studied in Buy-It-Now auctions, as to this point little is known about how sellers set Buy-It-Now prices. We investigate into this question by analyzing seller behavior in Buy-It-Now auctions. More precisely, we combine the use of a real online auction market (the eBay platform and eBay traders) with the techniques of lab experiments. We find a striking link between the information about agents provided by the eBay market institution and their behavior. Information about buyers is correlated with their deviation from true value bidding. Sellers respond strategically to this information when deciding on their Buy-It-Now prices. Thus, our results highlight potential economic consequences of information publicly available in (online) market institutions.electronic markets; experience; online auctions; BIN price; buyout
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