Predicting the End-Price of Online Auctions

Online auctions have become one of the fastest growing modes of onlinecommerce transactions. eBay has 94 million active members buying and selling goods at a staggering rate. These auctions are also producing large amounts of data that can be utilized to provide services to the buyers and sellers, market research, and product development. We collect historical auction data from eBay and use machine learning algorithms to predict end-prices of auction items. We describe the features used, and several formulations of the price prediction problem. Using the PDA category from eBay, we show that our algorithms are extremely accurate and can result in a useful set of services for buyers and sellers in online marketplaces.