Dresden 2006 – scientific programme

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AKSOE: Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AKSOE 14: Financial Markets and Risk Management III

AKSOE 14.3: Talk

Thursday, March 30, 2006, 17:00–17:30, BAR 205

Statistical properties of online auctions — •Andreas Schadschneider and Alireza Namazi — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität zu Köln, 50937 Köln

Online auction sites like eBay have become increasingly popular over the last years. They use so-called ’second price auctions’ where the final price is determined by the second highest bid. We have analyzed the statistical properties of a large number of auctions run on eBay.de. It is found that many observables (number of bids placed etc.) follow rather simple distributions. Also relations between variables typically are described by power-laws, e.g. in the case of the dependence of the final price on the number of submitted bids. We show that these properties help to identify a rather common form of fraud known as ’shill bidding’. Furthermore we analyze the distribution of bid submission times in order to determine the different strategies used by the agents.