When bargaining meets auctions: assessing the effect of best offer on eBay auctions

Huiwen Hu, Greg Dowd and Dylan Bouchard

Applied Economics Letters, 2022, vol. 29, issue 3, 261-266

Abstract: In this paper, we apply a recently popularized methodology called ‘matched listings’ to eBay API data to study the effect of enabling eBay’s bargaining feature on auction outcomes. Our results indicate that enabling the bargaining feature increases sale probability by 3.17%. In addition, hypothesis testing indicates this estimate is consistent with eBay’s claim where enabling bargaining increases sale probability by 5%. Finally, we find that enabling bargaining has no impact on transaction price. We provide an innovative evaluation of whether the matched listings methodology works well. We find that this methodology is prone to endogeneity with longer time windows, causing a downward bias when estimating the treatment effect of enabling bargaining.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2020.1862746 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:29:y:2022:i:3:p:261-266

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2020.1862746

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().