The Timing of Bids in Internet Auctions: Market Design, Bidder Behavior, and Artificial Agents

Many bidders in eBay use bidding strategies that involve late bids, incremental bids, or both. Based on field evidence, we discuss the manner in which late bids are caused both by sophisticated, strategic reasoning and by irrationality and inexperience; the interaction of late bidding with incremental bidding; and the relation between market design and artificial agent design.