Background: This paper explores the financial viability of eBay's Buyer Protection Plan. Methods: We explore their warranty model assuming exponential auction listing and claims times, under competing assumptions of Normal (classical portfolio theory) versus Paretian claims (industry practice)...

Because of discrete bid increments, bidders at electronic auctions engage in shading instead of revealing their valuations, which would occur under the commonly assumed second-price rule. We demonstrate that misspecifying the pricing rule can lead to biased estimates of the latent valuation...