Consumer-to-Consumer Internet Auction Models

Internet auctions have become an increasingly common method for exchanging goods and services across the world both among consumers themselves, as well as between businesses and consumers. These Internet auction mechanisms have the scope of incorporating procedures of much greater complexity and variety, and they exhibit characteristics and properties that are quite distinct from conventional auctions. In this paper, the authors provide an experimental study of the performance characteristics and operational behaviour of a number of online auction models, including the fixed time forward auctions, the Vickrey auctions, and models with soft close variable auction times. These online auction models are studied through systematic simulation experiments, based on a series of operational assumptions, which characterize the arrival rate of bids, as well as the distribution from which the private values of buyers are sampled. Suggestions for efficient online auction design and procedures for improving auction performance are given, and the behaviour of the average auction income and average auction duration are quantified and compared.