Empirical research of online auctions has dramatically grown in recent years. Studies using publicly available bid data from websites such as eBay.com have found many divergences of bidding behavior and auction outcomes compared to ordinary offline auctions and auction theory. Among the main...

Semi-continuous data arise in many applications where naturally-continuous data become contaminated by the data generating mechanism. The resulting data contain several values that are too frequent, and in that sense are a hybrid between discrete and continuous data. The main problem is that...

Summary.We introduce a new family of non-homogeneous Poisson processes (NHPP) that are useful for modeling pure and contaminated self-similar processes which describe arrivals within a finite time period. Our motivation comes from the bid arrival process in online auctions.Modeling bid arrivals...

We introduce a semiparametric approach for modelling the effect of concurrent events on an outcome of interest. Concurrency manifests itself as temporal and spatial dependences. By temporal dependence we mean the effect of an event in the past. Modelling this effect is challenging since events...

The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is a popular tool for maximizing likelihood functions in the presence of missing data. Unfortunately, EM often requires the evaluation of analytically intractable and high dimensional integrals. The Monte Carlo EM (MCEM) algorithm is the natural...