Enrico H. Gerding
Nicholas R. Jennings
ABSTRACT
In this paper, 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 seller can further improve its utility by shill bidding (i.e., pretending to be a buyer in order to bid in its own auction). But, using an evolutionary simulation, we show that this shill bidding introduces inefficiences within the market. However, we then go on to show that these inefficiences can be reduced when the mediating auction institution uses appropriate auction fees that deter sellers from submitting shill bids.
- S. M. Bohte, E. Gerding, and J. A. La Poutré. Market-based recommendation: Agents that compete for consumer attention. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 4:420--448, 2004. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. Burguet and J. Sákovics. Imperfect competition in auction design. International Economic Review, 40(1):231--247, 1999.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. Preston McAfee. Mechanism design by competing sellers. Econometrica, 61(6):1281--1312, 1993.Google ScholarCross Ref
- W. Wang, Z. Hidvégi, and A. B. Whinston. Shill-proof fee (SPF) schedule: The sunscreen against seller self-collusion in online english auctions. Working Paper, 2004.Google Scholar
Recommendations
Competing sellers in online markets: reserve prices, shill bidding, and auction fees
TADA/AMEC'06: Proceedings of the 2006 AAMAS workshop and TADA/AMEC 2006 conference on Agent-mediated electronic commerce: automated negotiation and strategy design for electronic marketsIn this paper, 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 in the ...
Sellers competing for buyers in online markets: reserve prices, shill bids, and auction fees
IJCAI'07: Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on Artifical intelligenceWe consider competition between sellers offering similar items in concurrent online auctions through a mediating auction institution, where each seller must set its individual auction parameters (such as the reserve price) in such a way as to attract ...
Competition among asymmetric sellers with fixed supply
EC '13: Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerceMotivated by the market for display advertisement over the Internet, we study competition between firms with a fixed supply whose size cannot be changed, and analyze the resulting revenue. We are most interested in studying the asymmetric case in which ...
Comments