A Study On Online Auctions And Pricing Of Intangible Assets

Electronic markets based on the Internet—in particular, online auctions—have become popular venues for conducting business transactions. The main contribution of the dissertation includes the following three aspects. First, based on eBay.com, the dissertation studies the optimal strategies of the auctioneers' and bidders' in an online English auction, and analyzes the impacts of some bid constraints on the bidding behavior, e.g., proxy bidding, bid increment, the closing rule. We show that in independent-private-value environment, bidding early and reporting their true valuations as their bids is the dominant strategies of bidders, and find that the optimal starting bid without reserve price will lead to the same expected revenue as that the optimal reserve price does. Second, the dissertation models an online sequential auction by using Markov decision processes, and discusses the optimal allocation strategies and shows its properties that the more capacity is, or the less time remains, the more items will be allocated. Moreover, we compare this sequential online auction with other mechanisms, such as posted-price, dynamic posted-price and sequential auctions with dynamic reserve prices, and find that the expected revenue obtained by the sequential auctions with optimal dynamic reserve prices is the highest one, and that by the post-price mechanism is the relatively lowest one. Third, by introducing a cooperative condition to the double auction model, the dissertation proposes a mechanism for the transaction and the cooperation of intangible assets, obtains the equilibrium strategies of participants on the pricing of intangible assets, and examines the impact of some factors on their equilibrium bidding strategies. Finally, some conclusions and limitations of the dissertation and further researches based on the dissertation are discussed.