Affective Images, Emotion Regulation and Bidding Behavior: An Experiment on the Influence of Competition and Community Emotions in Internet Auctions

• We investigate the impact of affective images on bidding behavior in online auctions.
• We find significantly different bids in response to community and competition images.
• Image influence is moderated by bidders' individual tendency to suppress their emotions.
• The more bidders try to suppress their emotional responses, the more they are affected.

Internet auction sites frequently employ images as design elements on their websites in order to either induce a sense of community or competition among the bidders. In this paper, we investigate the impact of such affective images on bidding behavior in a controlled laboratory experiment during which participants' emotional processes are assessed through psychophysiological measurements. Immediately before placing a bid in a first-price sealed-bid auction, bidders are presented a) pictures of competitive sports scenes, b) pictures of families or children, or c) a blank screen. Participants place significantly lower bids when they were exposed to pictures that induce competition emotions as opposed to pictures that induce community emotions. This relationship is moderated by the bidders' emotion regulation strategy. In particular, we find that the more participants try to suppress their emotional responses to the presented images, the more they are affected in their bidding behavior. Our results entail valuable insights about the coherence of emotional stimuli on Internet auction marketplaces and customers' decisions. They also question recent marketing strategies by the market leader.