Online auction mechanism has enriched the trading community. It brings together both sellers and buyers from around the world without the geographical limitations and time constraints. In this paper, an auction market is simulated with multiple English auctions that are running concurrently consisting of human bidders and intelligent agents with various bidding strategies. For the analysis, we ...

Relationships between buying and selling organizations in business markets are varied and complex. One important relationship is procurement, or the type of alliance that buyers form with sellers to fulfill their purchasing needs. Multiple sourcing is often proposed to prevent a variety ofprocurement problems. We develop a bidding model to investigate the effect of multiple sourcing on competit...

Internet auction companies have developed innovative tools that enable sellers to reveal more information about their credibility and product quality to avoid the “lemons” problem. On the basis of signaling and auction theories, the authors propose a typology of Internet auction quality and credibility indicators, adopt and modify Park and Bradlow’s (2005) model, and use eBay as an example to e...

Internet-based online auctions provide unprecedented opportunities for sellers to submit shill bids. Shill bidding increases the seller’s expected utility but deceives buyers and damages auctioneers’ reputation. Because the anonymity of the Internet makes it difficult to catch shill bidders through statistical analysis or encryption, we suggest that the most effective approach is to make it une...

We consider competition between sellers offering similar items in concurrent online auctions, where each seller must set its individual auction parameters (such as the reserve price) in such a way as to attract buyers. We show that there exists a pure Nash equilibrium in the case of two sellers with asymmetric production costs. In addition, we show that, rather than setting a reserve price, a s...

In electronic markets, seller information is often obscured or unavailable, which current theories of reputation and opportunism contend will motivate opportunistic behavior. We investigate how reputable and opportunistic behaviors are motivated in online auctions. This exploratory study examines irregular bidding, which occurs when a bidder makes a bid for an item in an auction, yet that bidde...

Increasing popularity of online auctions and the associated frauds have drawn the attention of many researchers. It is found [hal most of the auction sites prefer English auction to other auction mechanisms. The ease of adopting multiple fake idenlities over the Internet nourishes shill bidding by fraudulent sellers in English auction. In this paper we derive an equilibrium bidding strategy (0 ...

We have designed configurable agents to represent users in online auctions, specificMly the Michigan AuctionBot. The agents can be configured, started, and monitored from a web interface. We implemented three types of agents, distinguished by their different ways of using information in the auctions. A competitive agent does not use any information in the auction market. It chooses its actions ...

In this work we consider selling items using a sequential first price auction mechanism. We generalize the assumption of conservative bidding to extensive form games (henceforth optimistic conservative bidding), and show that for both linear and unit demand valuations, the only pure subgame perfect equilibrium where buyers are bidding in an optimistic conservative manner is the minimal Walrasia...

This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the other bidders. In the two-bidder case, we derive an optimal randomized bidding algorithm, by which the disadvantaged bidder can procure at least half of the a...