Bidding Strategy in Simultaneous English Auctions Using Game Theory

With more and more people using the internet for a wide range of purposes, internet use has become an absolute necessity for businesses to survive and grow. Online auction have expanded rapidly over the last decade and have become a fascinating new type of business or commercial transaction in this digital era. The online auction is an important e-commerce application which enables the buying and selling of goods through a dynamic pricing strategy. Users can access the auction system through the Web, WAP-enabled devices and agents. The paper assumes that the auction system supports only English auction. Predicting bidding strategy is not easy, since it is dependent on many factors such as the behavior of each bidder, the number of bidders participating in that auction as well as each bidder's reservation price. Here, simultaneous English auctions for the same item are considered. This paper uses the concept of Game Theory, to predict the bidding strategy in an auction and helps the user to decide whether to proceed with the auction or to back off from the auction so as to maximize the bidder's profit. This paper considers the user, bidding for an item simultaneously in more than one auction site.