Abstract
Our paper utilizes semi-nonparametric and nonparametric methods to directly estimate consumer surplus in eBay computer monitor sales. We compare these with parametric estimates. We also develop a new measure of how competitive an auction is—the consumer share of surplus—and a new method to calculate these statistics. This distribution free methodology requires the assumption that the pool of potential bidders is constant across auctions, but it is not sensitive to the upper tail and does not require estimating the underlying distribution of values.
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- 1.
Specifically, Lucking-Reiley et al. (2007) focused on U.S. Indian Head pennies minted between 1859 and 1909, auctions in which only one coin was for sale, and the coin was in mint state (MS) with grades of between 60 and 66 on a 70-point scale.
- 2.
See, for example, the website at http://www.baywotch.de/. We thank Rouwen Hahn from the University of Münster, Germany for this information.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sandra Campo and participants at the Conference on Auctions and Games, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, October 12–14, 2007 as well as Ravi Bapna and participants of the FTC Roundtable: Economics of Internet Auctions, October 27th, 2005, Washington, DC for insightful and needed criticism on earlier drafts of this paper. The usual caveat applies.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
4.1.1 Tables and Descriptive Statistics
Appendix 2
4.2.1 Tables of Semi-nonparametric Estimation
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Hasker, K., Jiang, B., Sickles, R.C. (2014). Estimating Consumer Surplus in eBay Computer Monitor Auctions. In: Sickles, R., Horrace, W. (eds) Festschrift in Honor of Peter Schmidt. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-8008-3_4
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