Ftc Bureau of Economics Roundtable on the Economics of Internet Auctions: An Executive Summary

Abstract

On October 27, 2005, the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission hosted a roundtable on the Economics of Internet Auctions. This one-day conference brought together academic experts, industry professionals and government economists to discuss and learn about Internet auctions. This paper is a brief summary of the papers presented and panel discussions at the conference. The conference covered three main issues: (1) fraud and information problems on consumer-to-consumer Internet auction sites like eBay, (2) competition between auction sites and amongst auction site users, and (3) the data generated from auction sites and what inferences may be drawn from such data. The keynote address was given by Prof. Hal Varian. Varian discussed the auctions used by Google to sell "keyword" searches.

Keywords: Internet Auctions, FTC, ecommerce

JEL Classification: D00, D44, L00, L40, L80