Auctions with buy prices

Internet auction sites eBay and Yahoo have developed an innovative hybrid auction designs that incorporate buy prices. My dissertation focuses on eBay's Buy It Now (BIN, hereafter) auction. The BIN hybrid auction combines a standard ascending bid auction with a posted-price offer "buy price".;Chapter 1: Risk aversion and impatience of either the bidders or the seller have mainly been used to explain the popularity of BIN auctions in IPV models. Using a pure common value framework, we model auctions with buy prices, when the bidders and the seller are either risk neutral or risk averse. It characterizes equilibriumbidding strategies in a general setup and then analyzes a seller's incentive to post a buy price. There is no incentive to post a buy price for a risk neutral seller. But when the seller is risk averse, a suitably chosen buy price can raise the seller's expected utility.;Chapter 2: The theoretical predictions from Wooders and Reynolds (2003) and Chapter 1 show that the introduction of a buy price causes the seller's revenue to move in opposite directions in private value and common value settings. Our results show that a buy price raises seller revenue in private value auctions. The results for common value auctions are inconsistent with the theoretical predictions. As a result, we develop and estimate a behavioral model of common value BIN auctions based on the winner's curse and overweighting of a bidder's private information which explains all the departures from the rational model.;Chapter 3: Haile and Tamer (2003) first used an incomplete econometric model in an auction context, assuming that bidders bid up to their values and do not allow an opponent to win at a price they are willing to beat. Chapter 3 extends these incomplete models to eBay's BIN auctions. We develop and estimate an equilibrium model for BIN independent private value auctions with a stochastic and unknown number of potential bidders who enter the auction sequentially using a new data set 10 of 3245 eBay auctions of Pentium-3 laptops that ran between 22 July to 10 August 2005.