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Shills and Snipes

Subir Bose and Arup Daripa

No 1510, Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance from Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics

Abstract: Online auctions with a fixed end-time often experience a sharp increase in bidding towards the end despite using a proxy-bidding format. We provide a novel explanation of this phenomenon under private values. We study a correlated private values environment in which the seller bids in her own auction (shill bidding). Bidders selected randomly from some large set arrive randomly in an auction, then decide when to bid (possibly multiple times) over a continuous time interval. A submitted bid arrives over a continuous time interval according to some stochastic distribution. The auction is a continuous-time game where the set of players is not commonly known, a natural setting for online auctions. We show that there is a late-bidding equilibrium in which bids are delayed to the latest instance involving no sacrifice of probability of bid arrival, but shill bids fail to arrive with positive probability, and in this sense optimal late bidding serves to snipe the shill bids. We show conditions under which the equilibrium outcome is unique. Our results suggest that under private values, the case against shill-bidding might be weak.

Keywords: Online auctions; correlated private values; last-minute bidding; sniping; shill bidding; random bidder arrival; continuous bid time; continuous bid arrival process. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15269 First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Shills and snipes (2017) Downloads
Working Paper: Shills and Shipes (2014) Downloads
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