Online marketplaces are increasingly adopting innovative business models such as using paid advertising as a major revenue source. We explore the two popular advertising tools, sponsored search and social media endorsement, in attracting web traffic from online sellers' perspective. We estimate...

The size distribution of firms is an important indicator of market concentration. Studying the distribution of sales for eBay’s commercial sellers, this paper provides the first analysis of a firm size distribution (FSD) at an online market, further examining its evolution, and the underlying...

Retailers often conduct non-overlapping sequential online auctions as a revenue generation and inventory clearing tool. We build a stochastic dynamic programming model for the seller’s lot-size decision problem in these auctions. The model incorporates a random number of participating bidders...

The advent of online advertising has simultaneously created unprecedented opportunities for advertisers to target consumers and prompted privacy concerns among consumers and regulators. This paper estimates the financial impact of privacy policies on the online display ad industry by applying an...

We empirically investigate the factors which influence a buyer's behavior in making an offer to purchase a car listed on eBay Motors using the “Best Offer” option. Our results indicate that a buyer's first offer is affected by observed information, including the number of buyers making an...

We present an empirical investigation of the role of marketing agencies in Google's online ad auctions. By combining data on advertisers' affiliation to marketing agencies with data on bidding in ad auctions, we analyze how changes in the concentration of clients in the same industry under the...

Internet auctions are an important resource in the business-to-business (B2B) market for companies that want to save money and increase profits. Understanding how auctions work on the Internet is mandatory in today's marketplace. Auctions can be used to do everything from selling excess...

I examine the effect of competition on eBay Motors. I specify a simple model of auction choice and show that the expected transaction price falls with an increase in the number of competitors. I then test for this effect using data from 5,500 auctions for Chevrolet Corvettes. To address...

In this paper we undertake an empirical study of advertising in an online auctions market, or, more precisely, advertising on eBay. The type of advertising that we consider works as follows: at the time of listing the item on eBay, sellers are offered the option of incurring an extra fee in...

This paper studies the role of communication and reputation in market interactions using data from online procurement auctions. Not only positive reputation ratings but also engaging in communication increases a bidder’s probability of winning the auction. Messages are primarily used to reduce...