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As penny auction prevails on the internet over the past few years, it engages consumers to participate in the auction featuring “purchase with huge savings.” However its unique bidding rule forces the bidders to learn and adjust the way they plays works. This paper collects the comprehensive bidding history of all auctions released by Quickbid, a penny auction website in Taiwan. We conduct exploratory analysis on the data, observe the characteristics of different bidders, and discuss how these characteristics will affect their bidding behaviors. Our evidence suggests that most of the website revenues come from short-term players who have lower number of auctions, which implies that their bidding performance is inferior, and this results from the poor bidding strategy. Nevertheless, long-term players are capable of developing their own strategies and gaining a huge profit from website. In addition, the component of bidding players also affect behaviors of individual players. Simply put, the more long-term bidders, the more competitive between sophisticated players. Hence decrease the chances of winning auctions and profits of all bidders. Lastly, the study shows that the number of players may vary depending on the product category, bidding time, etc.
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