Temporary and Permanent Buyout Prices in Online Auctions

Increasingly used in online auctions, buyout prices allow bidders to instantly purchase the item listed. We distinguish two types: a temporary buyout option disappears if a bid above the reserve price is made; a permanent one remains throughout the auction or until it is exercised. In a model featuring time-sensitive bidders with uniform valuations and Poisson arrivals but endogenous bidding times, we focus on finding temporary and permanent buyout prices maximizing the seller's discounted revenue, and examine the relative benefit of using each type of option in various environments. We characterize equilibrium bidder strategies in both cases and then solve the problem of maximizing seller's utility by simulation. Our numerical experiments suggest that buyout options may significantly increase a seller’s revenue. Additionally, while a temporary buyout option promotes early bidding, a permanent option gives an incentive to the bidders to bid late, thus leading to concentrated bids near the end of the auction.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Internet auctions with a temporary buyout option

In an Internet auction, bidders sequentially decide whether or not to enter, and each bidder has to pay a participation cost. In this paper we model an Internet auction with a temporary buyout option. Our main result shows that under certain condition, offering a temporary buyout price would encourage entry of risk neutral bidders, and hence enable the seller to increase expected payoff.Internet auction, temporary buyout option

Buyout prices in online auctions

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-154).Buyout options allow bidders to instantly purchase at a specified price an item listed for sale through an online auction. A temporary buyout option disappears once a regular bid above the reserve price is made, while a permanent option remains available until it is exercised or the auction ends. Buyout options are widely used in online auctions and have significant economic importance: nearly half of the auctions today are listed with a buyout price and the option is exercised in nearly one fourth of them. We formulate a game-theoretic model featuring time-sensitive bidders with independent private valuations and Poisson arrivals but endogenous bidding times in order to answer the following questions: How should buyout prices be set in order to maximize the seller's discounted revenue? What are the relative benefits of using each type of buyout option? While all existing buyout options we are aware of currently rely on a static buyout price (i.e. with a constant value), what is the potential benefit associated with using instead a dynamic buyout price that varies as the auction progresses?(cont.) For all buyout option types we exhibit a Nash equilibrium in bidder strategies, argue that this equilibrium constitutes a plausible outcome prediction, and study the problem of maximizing the corresponding seller revenue. In particular, the equilibrium strategy in all cases is such that a bidder exercises the buyout option provided it is still available and his valuation is above a time-dependent threshold. Our numerical experiments suggest that a seller may significantly increase his utility by introducing a buyout option when any of the participants are time-sensitive. Furthermore, while permanent buyout options yield higher predicted revenue than temporary options, they also provide additional incentives for late bidding and may therefore not be always more desirable. The numerical results also imply that the increase in seller's utility (over a fixed buyout price auction) enabled by a dynamic buyout price is small and does not seem to justify the corresponding increase in complexity.by Shobhit Gupta.Ph.D

Buyout Option and Reserve Price in Online Auctions: Should I Bid or Buy Out?

This article examines the influences of two forms of buyout options – permanent (i.e., a buyer could buy out the item at any point during the entire bidding process) and temporary (i.e., buyout option ceases to be present once the bidding price exceeds the reserve price) – under the presence of reserve price on a buyer’s decision in online auctions. We propose that the presence of permanent buyout option leads a buyer to buy out instead of bidding. However, a buyer with temporary buyout option would attempt to bid above the reserve price so as to prevent other buyers from ending the auction prematurely. A series of controlled experiments was subsequently conducted to investigate the impact of buyout permanence (permanent versus temporary), price contrast (small versus large difference between the average clearance price and buyout price) and reserve price (low versus high) on a buyer’s behavior. The results support our conjecture by suggesting that a buyer is more likely to be loss averse and has a higher propensity to buy out in the presence of the permanent buyout option. However, when facing the temporary buyout option, a buyer becomes reserve-price conscious and is more likely to bid

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).

Internet auctions with a temporary buyout option

We model an Internet auction with a temporary buyout option. Our main result shows that under certain parameter values, there exist two types of equilibria where offering a temporary buyout option with an appropriate reserve price enables the seller to increase expected revenue

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

Auctioning with Aspirations: Keep Them Low (Enough)

In an auction with a buy price, a seller offers bidders the opportunity to forgo competing in an auction by transacting immediately at a pre-specified fixed price. If a seller has aspirations in the form of a reference price that depends upon the auction's reserve price and buy price, she does best to keep her aspirations sufficiently low by designing a no-reserve auction with a buy price low enough that some bidder types would exercise it with positive probability in equilibrium. The seller is indifferent between the auction component of her mechanism being a first- or second-price auction.Auction; Aspiration; Buy price; Internet; Reference-dependence

How eBay Sellers set “Buy-it-now” prices - Bringing The Field Into the Lab

In this paper we introduce a new type of experiment that combines the advantages of lab and field experiments. The experiment is conducted in the lab but using an unchanged market environment from the real world. Moreover, a subset of the standard subject pool is used, containing those subjects who have experience in conducting transactions in that market environment. This guarantees the test of the theoretical predictions in a highly controlled environment and at the same time enables not to miss the specific features of economic behavior exhibited in the field. We apply the proposed type of experiment to study seller behavior in online auctions with a Buy-It-Now feature, where early potential bidders have the opportunity to accept a posted price offer from the seller before the start of the auction. Bringing the field into the lab, we invited eBay buyers and sellers into the lab to participate in a series of auctions on the eBay platform. We investigate how traders' experience in a real market environment influences their behavior in the lab and whether abstract lab experiments bias subjects' behavior