Truck and Barter

From Knowledge@Wharton, an article on bidding behavior in online auctions:

Would you like to go on an Internet auction site and know how much to bid for a certain item -- and also know that you didn't overpay for that item? How about when you sell an item in an online auction: Would you like to know what price to set that ensures you don't leave money on the online table?

Wharton marketing and statistics professor Eric T. Bradlow can't provide specific answers. But he does offer guidance on the behavior of potential buyers in a new study entitled, "An Integrated Model for Bidding Behavior in Internet Auctions: Whether, Who, When, and How Much," recently published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Bradlow, who is also academic director of the Wharton Small Business Development Center, co-authored the study with Cornell marketing professor Young-Hoon Park. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model formally the behavioral aspects of bidding behavior for the entire sequence of bids in Internet auctions," the authors write.

Here's a a draft of the paper.