Bid-war: Human or Robot? June 2, 2015

Online auctions have become an increasingly important aspect of e-commerce. However, for consumers, the chances of landing a winning bid in online auctions has become increasingly more difficult with the abundance of “bidding robots”. Bidding robots such as “BidRobot” and “Auction Sniper” are pieces of software that are configured by the user to follow any number of auctions on different auction sites simultaneously, bidding in place of the user according to predefined settings and preferences. Humans are not able to attend to and monitor auctions with the same capacity as a computer, which can make complex bidding decisions in split-second time and can follow an auction with nonstop, undivided attention. Thus bidding robots gain a significant competitive advantage over their human counterparts, posing an interesting problem for auction sites that wish to level the playing field by identifying and banning bid bots. In this paper, we seek discover methods to predict whether certain bidders are in fact humans or bidding robots.