Many bidders in eBay employ bidding strategies that involve late bids, incremental bids, or both. Based on field evidence, we discuss the manner in which late bids are caused both by sophisticated, strategic reasoning and by irrationality and inexperience, the interaction of late bidding and...

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as eBay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that...