Counting your customers: who are they and what will they do next?
Management Science
Analysis and Design of Business-to-Consumer Online Auctions
Management Science
Replicating Online Yankee Auctions to Analyze Auctioneers' and Bidders' Strategies
Information Systems Research
Theory, Volume 1, Queueing Systems
Theory, Volume 1, Queueing Systems
The Role of Reputation Systems in Reducing On-Line Auction Fraud
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Reputation and Dispute in eBay Transactions
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
The Impact of eBay's Buy-It-Now Function on Bidder Behavior
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Consumer Bidding Behavior on Internet Auction Sites
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Bidding Behavior in On-line Auctions: An Examination of the eBay Pokemon Card Market
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Bid or Buy? Individual Shopping Traits as Predictors of Strategic Exit in On-Line Auctions
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
An Empirical Investigation of Third-Party Seller Rating Systems in E-Commerce: The Case of buySAFE
Journal of Management Information Systems
INFORMS Journal on Computing
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Numerical inversion of 2-D Laplace transforms applied to fractional diffusion equations
Applied Numerical Mathematics
Ex Ante Information and the Design of Keyword Auctions
Information Systems Research
International Journal of Business Information Systems
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Sellers in eBay are often small-business owners whose livelihood depends on fast turnaround of their cash flows. Unlike in traditional auctions, these sellers are content to sell as soon as some target price is reached. While a wealth of literature exists on the final rent of the various stakeholders in a traditional auction setting, what is of interest here is to estimate the time required to reach a certain bid level in ongoing auctions. This paper introduces an analytical model to estimate the time it takes an online auction to reach a prespecified price threshold. The motivation for the research is to avoid unnecessary delays in conducting the transaction. Specifying the right duration would benefit small sellers who would realize the revenue proceeds from the sale faster. To this end, we model the bidding process as an infinite quasi-birth-death process, characterized by bursts of rapid bidding and subsequent lulls. We obtain closed-form solutions for the transient probability distribution in the frequency domain of the bid prices in an ongoing auction, which are then used to compute the transient probability distributions in the time domain. Experienced auctioneers can use these results to estimate expected ending times for their auctions. Sample observations from online auctions indicate that there may be potential room for improvement for sellers in setting their auction ending times. Simulations of the quasi-birth-death processes back up the theoretical observations.