Online auction markets

Central to the explosive growth of the Internet has been the desire of dispersed buyers and sellers to interact readily and in a manner hitherto impossible. Underpinning these interactions, auction pricing mechanisms have enabled Internet transactions in novel ways. Despite this massive growth and new medium, empirical work in marketing and economics on auction use in Internet contexts remains relatively nascent. Accordingly, this dissertation investigates the role of online auctions; it is composed of three essays.;The first essay, "Online Auction Demand," investigates seller and buyer interactions via online auction websites, such as eBay. Such auction sites are among the earliest prominent transaction sites on the Internet (eBay started in 1995, the same year Internet Explorer was released) and helped pave the way for e-commerce. Hence, online auction demand is the first topic considered in my dissertation. The second essay, "A Dynamic Model of Sponsored Search Advertising," investigates sponsored search advertising auctions, a novel approach that allocates premium advertising space to advertisers at popular websites, such as search engines. Because sponsored search advertising targets buyers in active purchase states, such advertising venues have grown very rapidly in recent years and have become a highly topical research domain. These two essays form the foundation of the empirical research in this dissertation. The third essay, "Sponsored Search Auctions: Research Opportunities in Marketing," outlines areas of future inquiry that I intend to pursue in my research. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...