We study experimentally the effect of bargaining power in two sequential mechanisms that offer the possibility to trade at a fixed price before an auction. In the "Buy-It-Now" format, the seller has the bargaining power and offers a price prior to the auction; whereas in the "Sell-It-Now"...

Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a...

In this paper we introduce a new type of experiment that combines the advantages of lab and field experiments. The experiment is conducted in the lab but using an unchanged market environment from the real world. Moreover, a subset of the standard subject pool is used, containing those subjects...

This paper analyzes the trade of an indivisible good within a two-stage mechanism, where a seller first negotiates with one potential buyer about the price of the good. If the negotiation fails to produce a sale, a second 'price sealed' bid auction with an additional buyer is conducted. The...

We investigate experimentally on eBay how sellers set prices in "Buy-It-Now" (BIN) auctions. We find that the eBay format leads to prices substantially below those expected in second-price auctions. Moreover, our results reveal that the information available on eBay about buyer experience and...

In Buy-It-Now (BIN, hereafter) auctions, sellers can make a \"take-it-or-leave-it\" price offer (BIN price) prior to an auction. We analyse experimentally how eBay sellers set BIN prices and whether they benefit from offering them. Using the real eBay environment in the laboratory, we find that...

We study experimentally the effect of bargaining power in two sequential mechanisms that offer the possibility to trade at a fixed price before an auction. In the “Buy-It-Now” format, the seller has the bargaining power and offers a price prior to the auction; whereas in the...

In Buy-It-Now auctions, sellers can post a take-it-or-leave-it price offer prior to an auction. While the literature almost exclusively looks at buyers in such combined mechanisms, the current paper summarizes results from the sellers' point of view. Buy-It-Now auctions are complex mechanisms...

In eBay s Buy-it-Now auctions sellers can post prices at which buyers can purchase a good prior to an auction. We study how sellers set Buy-it-Now prices when buyers have independent private values for a single object for sale. We test the predictions of a model by combining the real auction...