Performance of Auctions and Sealed Bids

We develop models of automated E-commerce techniques, which predict the economic outcomes of these decision mechanisms, including the price attained by a good and the resulting income per unit time, as a function of the rate at which bidders provide the bids and of the time taken by the seller to decide whether to accept a bid. This paper extends previous work in two main directions. Since automated E-commerce mechanisms are typically implemented in software residing on the Internet, this paper shows how network quality of service will impact the economic outcome of automated auctions. We also analyse sealed bids which can also be automated, but which differ significantly from auctions in the manner in which information is shared between the bidders and the the party that decides the outcome. The approach that we propose opens novel avenues of research that bring together traditional computer and system performance analysis and the economic analysis of Internet based trading methods.