Theory

Review literature, find open problems, work on them:

 auctions with discrete value distributions

 combinatorial auctions, including those with 
  budget constraints 

 third-price auctions with no pure equilibria

 are there auctions with mixed equilibria?

 compare the variance of the revenue in various auctions? 

 analyze the all-pay auction for risk-averse bidders:
  can you prove they will they shun such an auction?
  Similarly for risk-averse bissers in other autions.

 prove that some version of Frank Robinson's auction
  is revenue-equivalent to the Riley-Samuelson class,
  or not.

 study the susceptibility of various auction forms to 
  bid-taker cheating, bidder collusion 

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                 Field experiments

 Review literature. Is there a correlation or 
  anti-correlation between any appropriate pairs?:

 Open reserve, secret reserve, start/end time of day,
  day of week, month, start/end time on holiday, quality
  of photograph, description, price realized, number
  of bids, lateness of bid, feedback reputation

 Can you think of a novel way to test revenue equivalence?

 Is there a correlation between bidders who have raised 
  their own bids and winning (for example)?

 Study auctions that have developed in Massively Multiplayer
  Online Role-Playing Games: what formats are used, how
  are the forms suited to the games, what behavior is observed? 

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                 Lab experiments 

 Repeat any of the classic experiments: overbidding in
   first-price IPV auctions, learning in second-price,
   effect of clock speed in Dutch, etc.

 Figure out a way to distinguish between risk aversion
  and spite (anyone doing fMRI?)

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                   Programs

 Inherited versions of feedback reputation

 Sociology of bidders who bid on similar objects:
   map item space. For example, are people who
   bid on baseball cards more likely to bid on 
   Star Trek items than people who bid on professional
   wrestling memorabilia?

 Cautious search within a narrow area for current bid
  by bidder name

 Cautious search within a narrow area for bidder IDs
  in auctions that reach $200 and therefore subsequently
  become anonymized by eBay

 A general tool for mining eBay data that is nonintrusive,
  robust, easy to use, easy to read and edit 

 Automatically assemble a catalog of current prices in
  a particular subfield (Limoge China, US state spoons...).
  Easily updated of course. Compare to published
  catalogs in some areas?

 Track effect of news events on prices in some areas.
  People in the news and autographs, deaths and photos,
  autographs, etc. 

 Compare buy-it-now prices and non-buy-it-now prices.
  Can you develop a theory of the value of time?

 
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