In Search of an Efficient Market Mechanism for a Digital Economy: Virtual Field Experiments on Posted-price Markets and Auctions

In recent years, many retail businesses jumped on the Internet auction bandwagon and paid substantially high fees to learn and develop proper business strategies for this new environment. Unlike what most businesses in the real world presume, this research shows that discriminatory-price ascending-bid auctions in a digital economy might be not very beneficial for the sellers on the Internet, if sellers sell the identical digital products through both a typical posted-price market and an auction. Using an extensive technology infrastructure along with suitable incentives and rules for market agents, we found that a discriminatory-price ascending-bid auction, which is the most popular auction mechanism on the Internet, serves consumers better than it does the sellers or producers in the digital economy. That is, the average prices for digital goods in these auctions are substantially lower than the prices in a posted-price market. This shows that it is not so wise for sellers to jump on the bandwagon of Internet auctions, if there is a market place with posted-price mechanisms which sells comparable items, or if a seller does not have special advantages or strategies in this new market institution. Electronic market mechanisms provide powerful means of understanding and measuring consumer characteristics including willingness-to-pay and other demographics for sellers or producers. Many concern that sellers may extract the entire surplus from the market by using customization on the Internet, thus consumers will be worse off in this digital economy. We found that these sellers who can customize their products and prices fail to capture the whole consumers surplus and cannot exercise a monopoly. One major explanation for this phenomenon is that the competition among the sellers prohibits them from charging prices according to customers demand for each product, where switching from one seller to another is not so difficult for the customers, and reselling products among the buyers are prohibited.