The Liberal Order

Where are eBay communities?

Based on the number of transactions per capita during the sample period, eight of the top 10 most active eBay communities are smaller towns. Lumberton, N.J., was the most active community, followed by Nashville, Tenn., Henderson, Nev., Las Vegas; Talpa, Texas, Graton, Calif., Farmington, Ky., Coaldale, Colo., Indian Trail, N.C., and Walnut, Ind.

Story here.

Possible explanations:

1. Lower opportunity cost of time the further you are from more densely populated areas.
2. Better access to factory outlets.
3. Aging population (more estate sales).

Bid On a Meal

An eBay for meals at (supposedly) top restaurants in Glasgow.

Priceyourmeal.com, which launched in Glasgow in March, now has more than 80 restaurants on board, taking in excess of 700 bookings a week.

Registered users can use the site to bid for meals at top restaurants in auctions or haggle directly with the restaurants over meal prices.

A More Effective Means of Protecting Rights Holders, Perhaps

Tens of thousands of Boy Scouts here will be able to earn an activity patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a ``C'' enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry developed the curriculum as a way of emphasizing the ills of piracy to a generation that has grown up finding free music and video clips on the Internet.

Not surprisingly, this is happening in Los Angeles, home of the entertainment industry. It's a far more productive and non-confrontational means of educating your customer base.

Forever Not Your Girl

Singer Paula Abdul's foray into the world of eBay has ended without success - after an auction to win a day with the American Idol judge received no bids.

Who would've predicted that outcome?

eBay Related News

Katherine Schell is auctioning the rights to her song "The Gravity Situation" for one year. Story here.

eBay's biggest challenge is countering the media's obsession with the relatively small instances of fraud perpetrated through its site. Unfortunately, the company has always been less than open and forthright about the problems.

A first edition signed copy of Eragon sells for $9,050 on eBay. Story here.

The first controlled experiment on the value of positive feedback on eBay. Paper available here. I'm not finished reading the paper, but I'm still skeptical about these studies.

Striking It Rich on eBay

How easy is it to make a living on eBay?

The problem, he notes, is the "volume trap." The only way for a seller to increase income is to list more items, but that means finding more wholesalers, amping up an inventory system, and spending more time packing and shipping.

"If you are selling new items, the competition ends up raising the prices you must pay for your stock," Gibbs says. "Also, once you establish yourself, others will undercut your prices in order to take your sales, driving your profits per auction down."

People selling used items also get slammed by the same market forces, he adds. If you are selling an antique or collectible, you can look up pricing information on eBay first, and then sell the items yourself for slightly less, rather than go through a PowerSeller.

There are sellers who can hack it, Gibbs says, but he believes they're few and far between.

"The majority of the larger eBay sellers sacrifice lifestyle for volume," he says. "The smaller sellers chase this volume because they think it's the only way and ignore the consequences."

Does it pay to snipe on eBay?

Apparently so.

To test whether sniping is a smart way to do things or just truncates normal bidding, the South Korean team at Seoul National University produced a "master equation" for how bidding proceeds (it's:

nk(t+1) — nk(t) = w(k-1)(t)*n(k-1)(t) — wk(t)*nk(t) + sigma(k,1)*u(t),

if you really want to know), and then tested it against a massive number of auction records, some 264,073 items sold in one day on eBay and another 287,018 items sold in one year by eBay's Korean partner.

Plugging all those data into the model and testing the outcome in terms of how the auctions turned out, the team found that the probability of submitting a winning bid on an item indeed drops with each bid. "Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." The study appears in the current Physical Review E journal.

I wonder if they considered Thaler's "Winner's Curse?"

Computer Alarm

Check this out. A remote alarm for Apple Powerbooks.

Overstock.com

Overstock.com touts itself as a liquidator of excess inventory. You'd think, then, that they would be selling below the maufacturer's suggest retail price (MSRP). Unfortunately, that must not always be the case. This Toshiba model 27AF45 television is advertised on Overstock for $379.95, more than $120 below their stated selling price of $499.99. But here's the same television on Toshiba's web site with an MSRP of $329.99, or about $150 below what Overstock.com claims is the MSRP.

A Piece of History, Perhaps?

This seems a little morbid to me.

The flophouse bathtub James Earl Ray stood in to shoot Martin Luther King Jr. is for sale on eBay for a third time.

The auction, scheduled to run for 10 days, reopened Monday with an opening bid of $7,500, D'Army Bailey, the Memphis judge who owns the tub, said on Friday.

Here is the eBay page.