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ABSTRACT
(ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted.)
Online open-cry auctions have become popular. Because of the inevitable delay of the communication between the auctioneer and bidders, the current form of online open-cry auctions is not fully equivalent to traditional face-to-face real-time open-cry auctions. This disadvantage of online open-- cry auctions destructs the auction mechanism. This study proposes a synchronous online open-cry auction model. In this paper, the protocol for the synchronization of online open-cry auctions that supports activities leading to the effectiveness of auctions is examined. A prototype of the synchronous open-cry auction model, which is built with Java servlets, is further discussed.
Keywords: Electronic commerce; online open-cry auctions; synchronous model; object-oriented; business information systems analysis and design
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1. INTRODUCTION
Online auctions have been an important type of business to sell merchandise based upon effective pricing methods (Turban 1997; Klein and O'Keefe 1999). Traditionally, auctions are commonly applied to sell unique and unusual items including celebrities' personal property and art. Since the Internet became the e-commerce media, online auctions are virtually applied to all kinds of commodities ranging from low-price CD's to expensive real estate (eShop 2001). Electronic OTC (over-the-counter) is now handling 10% of listed equity trades and 16% of Nasdaq trades in the US financial markets (Kennedy 2001).
Compared with face-to-face selling and negotiation methods, auctions are certainly efficient. The philosophy behind auctions is to let the market determine the true value for the product. Bidders feel that they correctly evaluate the items they bid on, and auctioneers feel that they receive the highest winning bids for the items they sell. Online auctions enhance the cooperative behaviors in trading, and have profound impacts on operational research (Skitmore 2001), supply chain management (O'Brien 2001), and other fields. Nevertheless, research is still searching for new strategies for facilitating online auctions (Shneiderman 2000).
There are four basic types of online auctions: Open-cry (English), Dutch, sealed-bid first price, and Vickrey (second-price) (McAfee and McMillan 1987; Reck 1997; Lucking-Reiley 2000). In open-cry auctions, bidding begins with the lowest price, and proceeds to successively higher bids until no bidder is willing to increase the bid. Dutch auctions are descending-price auctions. Bidding starts...