Optimalal location in sequential online Auctions

In this chapter, we consider a sequential Internet auction system for Web services, where a seller wants to sell a given amount of items by several sequential auctions on the Web and has a reserve price set on the items. We present two such Internet auction cases: one is where the reserve price is private (known only by the seller). The other one is where the reserve is public (known to all). The buyers arrive according to a Poisson process. The usual assumption for auctions is that the buyers value the items independently with uniform distribution functions, and they honestly bid those values for the items. The number of items allocated to each auction is determined at the beginning of the auction, and the number of items auctioned off at each auction is determined by arriving buyers’ bids and the reserve price.