An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition exist and are described in the section about different types. The branch of economic theory dealing with auction types and participants' behavior in auctions is called auction theory.
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 32 countries, as of 2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and an additional or separate fee when those items are sold.
Mnet is software to run a peer-to-peer distributed data store for file sharing purpose. It aimed at substituting free sharing of digital resources, typical of P2P networks, with a market regulated by its own currency. Mnet is a fork of the software MojoNation.
A Dutch auction is one of several similar types of auctions for buying or selling goods. Most commonly, it means an auction in which the auctioneer begins with a high asking price in the case of selling, and lowers it until some participant accepts the price, or it reaches a predetermined reserve price. This type of price auction is most commonly used for goods that are required to be sold quickly such as flowers, fresh produce, or tobacco. A Dutch auction has also been called a clock auction or open-outcry descending-price auction. This type of auction shows the advantage of speed since a sale never requires more than one bid. It is strategically similar to a first-price sealed-bid auction.
An online auction is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with different bidding and selling rules.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.
An English auction is an open-outcry ascending dynamic auction. It proceeds as follows.
Shop at Bid was a British television shopping channel that ran daily auctions and later fixed price demonstrations. It was the world's first channel of its kind. It launched as Bid-Up.tv. The channel was owned by Bid Shopping.
In economics, a reservationprice is a limit on the price of a good or a service. On the demand side, it is the highest price that a buyer is willing to pay; on the supply side, it is the lowest price a seller is willing to accept for a good or service.
A Japanese auction is a dynamic auction format. It proceeds in the following way.
A bidding fee auction, also called a penny auction, is a type of all-pay auction in which all participants must pay a non-refundable fee to place each small incremental bid. The auction is extended each time a new bid is placed, typically by 10 to 20 seconds. Once time expires without a new bid being placed, the last bidder wins the auction and pays the amount of that bid. The auctioneer profits from both the fees charged to place bids and the payment for the winning bid; these combined revenues frequently total more than the value of the item being sold. Empirical evidence suggests that revenues from these auctions exceeds theoretical predictions for rational agents. This has been credited to the sunk cost fallacy. Such auctions are typically held over the Internet, rather than in person.
Auction sniping is the practice, in a timed online auction, of placing a bid likely to exceed the current highest bid as late as possible—usually seconds before the end of the auction—giving other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. This can be done either manually or by software on the bidder's computer, or by an online sniping service.
Auction theory is an applied branch of economics which deals with how bidders act in auction markets and researches how the features of auction markets incentivise predictable outcomes. Auction theory is a tool used to inform the design of real-world auctions. Sellers use auction theory to raise higher revenues while allowing buyers to procure at a lower cost. The conference of the price between the buyer and seller is an economic equilibrium. Auction theorists design rules for auctions to address issues which can lead to market failure. The design of these rulesets encourages optimal bidding strategies among a variety of informational settings. The 2020 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.”
Bidding is an offer to set a price tag by an individual or business for a product or service or a demand that something be done. Bidding is used to determine the cost or value of something.
Bob Shop, formerly Bidorbuy or bidorbuy.co.za, is a South African e-commerce website based on an internet auction and online marketplace model allowing individuals and businesses to trade with each other. Transactions on bidorbuy are in South African rands.
The term online travel auction is a system of buying and selling travel products and services online by offering them up for auction and then awarding the item to the highest bidder. The need for travel auctions emanated principally due to the high cost of travel. This high cost is also what led to the growth in popularity of low-cost carriers, a concept initially pioneered by Southwest Airlines, and later mimicked by Ryanair.
Swoopo was a bidding fee auction site where purchased credits were used to make bids. Prior to changing its name to Swoopo in 2008, the website was called Telebid. In March 2011, Swoopo's website became inaccessible, and a notice page claimed that Swoopo was experiencing "technical issues." In February 2012, DealDash obtained the domain name for Swoopo.com. The penny auction was invented by Lloyd Liske and William Buckell when the site was first created and known as telebid.com. At that time the site received bids by phone and charged to transfer their bids to the internet site. This is where the format of paying to place a bid started.
DealDash is a company that operates an online auction and shopping platform. It was founded in 2009, and is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The company's platform allows users to bid on and purchase a variety of products, including electronics, home goods, and gift cards.
MadBid was a Gamified eCommerce and online auction website registered under Marcandi Ltd. in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 2008 by Juha Koski, Madhur Srivastava and Daniel Rovira. The company operates in ten European countries including the UK, Ireland, Spain, France, and Australia. However, in August 2018, Madbid closed up the company and ended all sales.
Beezid was a Canadian online retailer and penny auction website located in Montreal, Quebec.
