The Emergence of Auctions on the Web

Auctions are formalized trading procedures in which the trading partners' interaction is governed by specific trading rules. Empirically we find a multiplicity of auction types with different trade objects, access rules for participants, and trading rules. During the 1980ies electronic auctions have been developed and implemented which distributed not only information about the trade objects electronically but also executed the trading process itself as computer-mediated process. Early examples outside the financial markets are the Tele Flower Auction (Heck et al. 1997) and the used car auction AUCTNET (Lee 1996). Electronic auctions are a special case of electronic markets on the one side and of automated negotiations on the other (cf. Beam; Segev 1997). The proliferation of the World Wide Web, declining communication costs and the increased visibility of online offerings has accelerated the diffusion of electronic auctions (Klein; O’Keffe 1999). Search engines like Yahoo! as well as specialized auction sites such as The Internet Auction List [http://www.usaweb.com/auction.html/], Bid Find WWW Auction Search [http://www.bidfind.com], The Auction Hunter [http://www.auctionhunter.com] lists hundreds of auctions.