In recent years, the increasing popularity of eCommerce, and particularly online auctions has stirred a great amount of scholarly research, especially in information systems, economics,and marketing, but little or no attention has been received from statistics. ECommerce arrives with enormous...

Analysts of survey data are often interested in modelling the population process, or superpopulation, that gave rise to a `target' set of survey variables. An important tool for this is maximum likelihood estimation. A survey is said to provide limited information for such inference if data used...