向下降价秒杀中顾客秒杀策略以及卖方期望收益分析

本文以流星秒杀网采用的向下降价秒杀规则为研究对象,分析了顾客参与秒杀的均衡策略以及卖方获得的期望收益;在此基础上,将向上加价秒杀与向下降价秒杀进行了对比;最后,讨论了秒杀起始价、价格下降幅度以及投标费用对卖方期望收益的影响,并得到了一些结论。

Bidding Strategy and Expected Revenue in a Descending Pay-per-Bid Auction

Recently, many electronic commerce websites have begun to using "pay-per-bid" auctions to sell items, from mp3 to television. In these auctions, bidders pay a fee for placing each bid. Although the winner's final purchase price is much lower than the market price of the item, the auctioneer can still profit from the bid fees.An analysis of descending pay-per-bid auctions is made in this paper. A general, full-information model is proposed and its equilibrium strategies are described. It can be found that the auctioneer's expected revenue is less than the market price. Then, the ending rules are modified to increase the auctioneer's expected revenue. A model is proposed and its equilibrium strategies are then solved. Further, the equilibrium strategies and the auctioneer's expected revenue are compared between in the ascending and descending pay-per-bid auctions. It is concluded that the probability that the descending pay-per-bid auction ends increases with its process, while the auctioneer's expected revenue in the descending pay-per-bid auction is less than that in the ascending pay-per-bid auction. Finally, the impacts of some controllable factors, i.e. the starting price, the bid fee and the bid decrement, on the expected revenue are analyzed. Utilizing numerical examples, results show that the optimal bid fee is 1 yuan and the optimal bid decrement is 0.01 yuan. Moreover, the auctioneer should set the starting price to be 4.5 percent of the market price to maximize his expected revenue. Analysis of descending pay-per-bid auctions represents a well-motivated avenue for further research and practice.