Introduction to online auction symposium

Abstract

On October 27 2005, the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics hosted a conference on the economics of Internet auctions. This special edition of the International Journal of Industrial Organization was inspired by the conference and includes papers presented at the conference. The conference had three main themes; fraud and information problems, competition and competition policy, and inference from Internet auction data. These three themes correspond to concerns deriving from the FTC’s consumer protection, antitrust and research roles. These three themes are also reflected in the papers presented in this edition. Internet auctions have become an important way to sell and exchange everything from Beanie Babies to cars and keyword searches. E-commerce’s largest companies, including eBay, Yahoo!, and Google, derive a substantial proportion of their revenue from Internet auctions. Internet auctions are increasingly used to sell expensive items such as cars and houses. Google and Yahoo! both use Internet auctions to sell keyword searches and these companies are expanding their use of these mechanisms to sell other