ii Exploratory Statistical Study of E-Bay Textbook Auctions

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Myron Hlynka for his guidance, support and encouragement through my graduate study. I would like to thank my departmental reader Dr. Karen Fung for her valuable course instruction and her time in examining this major paper. I would like to thank my family, especially my daughter who had to learn to do many things by herself. I would like to thank all the faculty and staff in the department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Windsor for their friendship, care and help to me. iv This paper reports an exploratory analysis and modeling of online auction data for text books at the eBay website, and also provides a number of descriptive statistics on patterns with some facts and figures relating to eBay auctions. We examined 1485 different textbook auctions, each with at least 5 bids. We divided our auctions into categories based on the number of bids. Category 1 consisted of auctions with 5, 6, 7 bids, Category 2 consisted of auctions with 8, 9, 10 bids,