Consumers' Trade-Offs of Online Auctions Alternatives - An Application of Conjoint Analysis

As auctions buyers and sellers become proliferated on the Internet, there are considerable interests in investigating consumer behavior in the new marketing context. Much of the research on online consumer behavior has focused on the economic dynamics of bidding and offerings, technical mechanism and privacy, while consumer trade-offs between auctions alternatives are still lacking in literature. The research objective of this paper is to examine how consumers evaluate each seller’s attributes and make bidding decisions. A conjoint analysis was used to investigate subject’s bidding intention and trust for a variety of used textbook sellers that differed in terms of bidding price, seller rating (feedback score), payment type, and shipping charge. This article provides an experimental test of consumer’s trade-offs in online auctions context. These findings are essential because they help identify the importance of those attributes of online auctions under the consideration of bidding intentions and seller’s trustworthiness. Interestingly, this paper suggests auctions sellers may succeed by simply compete on price. However, this conclusion could only be generalized in used textbook category; further research could include additional product categories as exemplars and different auctions attributes as factors. Although price and seller rating seem to be relatively more important factors, further research could examine factors in addition to payment type and shipping charge of the auctions.