Late bidding, sellers' reputation and competing auctions: Empirical essays oneBay auctions

Sellers' reputation and bidding behavior on eBay auctions for brand new and used commodities. Using an original dataset of eBay auctions for brand new and used video games, this article shows that sellers of used commodities charge reputation premiums. Reputation, however, have no effect on the price of relatively inexpensive brand new commodities. Reputation did not have significant effects on the probability of making sales or bidding late. Timing of the bids on eBay auctions for brand new goods. The existing literature on online auctions has pointed out an empirical regularity with respect to the timing of the bids: Most of the bidding activity is concentrated at the end of the auctions. Roth & Ockenfels (2002) argued that bidders wait until the end to avoid falling into bidding wars. I used a unique dataset on auctions for a Playstation II game to provide an empirical assessment of the sniping theory. I do not find empirical support for this theory. Effects of competing and sequential auctions on bidders' behavior on eBay auctions. In most of the economic literature, online auctions are studied in isolation from each other. We study the effects of competing auctions that end at different times on Bidders' behavior. We use an original dataset of video games auctioned on eBay. Our main result shows that bidding activity tend to stop closer to the end of an auction when the difference between the closing times of that auction and the previous one is small. We also found that bidders facing competing auctions tend to bid in the first closing auction. These results suggest that late bidding in auctions with a hard stop time may not be equivalent to bidders waiting until the end of the auction to send their bids. We also found support for the idea that when facing competing auctions that end at similar times, bidders tend to bid at the auction with the lowest price. Our results also show that a bigger number of competing auctions reduces the final prices of the goods