Posted Price Offers in Internet Auction Markets (eBook)

Acknowledgements 5
Contents 6
List of Figures 9
List of Tables 11
1 Introduction 13
1.1 Overview 13
1.2 General Background 15
1.3 The Buy It Now Option on eBay 16
1.4 A First Assessment 17
2 Model of the APPO Market Institution 19
2.1 Preliminaries 20
2.2 Equilibrium Strategies and the Acceptance Threshold 30
2.3 Properties of the Acceptance Threshold 34
2.4 Revenues in an APPO 41
2.5 Optimal APPOs 45
2.6 Discussion and Related Literature 51
2.7 Summary 66
3 Design of the APPO Experiment 71
3.1 Motivation and Research Questions 71
3.2 Treatments 73
3.3 Collecting Data: the Strategy Method 75
3.4 Setup as a Stranger Experiment and Independency of Observations 80
3.5 Further Design Parameters 84
3.6 Conducting the Experiment 86
3.7 Analytic Solution 89
3.8 Statistical Tests for the Analysis of the Experiment 92
4 Results of the Experiment 99
4.1 Overview 99
4.2 Individual Auction Outcomes 104
4.3 Comparison of Auction Outcomes 117
4.4 Behavior of the Bidders 123
4.5 Behavior of the Sellers 136
4.6 Summary 142
5 Conclusion and Outlook 145
5.1 Summary of Main Results 145
5.2 Limitations of the Study 147
5.3 Outlook 148
A Mathematical Fundamentals 151
A.1 Basic Concepts of Game Theory 151
A.2 Risk Measurement by Arrow and Pratt 152
A.3 Order Statistics 154
A.4 Acceptance Threshold of Bidders in Example 2.3 155
B Parameters of the Experiment 157
B.1 Assignment of Participants to Groups 157
B.2 Bidder Valuations 161
B.3 Posted Price Offers in Treatments B3 and B5 162
B.4 Theoretical Solutions of Treatments A3 and A5 162
C Strategies of the Bidders in the Experiment 165
C.1 Treatment A3: Three Bidders, no PPO 165
C.2 Treatment A5: Five Bidders, no PPO 165
C.3 Treatment B3: Three Bidders, PPO 165
C.4 Treatment B5: Five Bidders, PPO 165
D Pictures and Screenshots 175
D.1 Pictures of the IW Experimental Lab 175
D.2 Screenshots of the Experimental Software 177
References 183
Abbreviations and Symbols 191
Abbreviations 191
Symbols 191