The seller's listing strategy in online auctions: Evidence from eBay

This paper studies the seller's online listing strategy and its consequences. By focusing on the fixed-price posting, buy-it-now auction and regular auction, we empirically investigate how the sellers choose the listing format and its associated strategic instruments to better understand their strategic behavior. An empirical model that addresses plausible concerns about sample selection bias and endogeneity is constructed to capture a seller's strategic behavior and examine how auction outcomes are related to this behavior. Based on the estimated model, we then conduct a counterfactual analysis. We find a tradeoff between the expected revenue and sale duration for the three listing formats.