Experimental study of reverse logistics e-commerce

Methods of improving scalability in online auctions include limiting the number of bidding opportunities, providing price information to users, and recommending auctions that may be of interest to the users. We constructed an experimental prototype auction system in the context of reverse logistics for electronics products. Experiments were designed to test the effects of the number of trading opportunities and the amount of previous price and bid information presented to users. The participants´ profits improved with the number of trading opportunities but showed mixed effects for increasing price and bid information. Some measures of market robustness and bid/price dynamics were affected by the information in unexpected ways. The induction of decision trees for an auction recommender is discussed along with the use of attribute selection to reduce the size of the tree.