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1. Literature survey and review of a specialized field of auction theory or experiment. The goal here is to determine the current state of knowledge in a fairly narrow aspect of auction theory or practice, and to review the recent work critically. Examples:
   • Risk aversion
   • Budget constraints
   • Combinatorial auctions and complexity theory
   • Interdependent values. The classic reference is P. R. Milgrom and R. J. Weber, "Theory of auctions and competitive bidding," Econometrica, vol. 50, no. 5, Sept. 1982, pp. 1089-1122.
   • Resale
   • Collusion
   • Efficiency in multiunit auctions
   
   
2. Measurement study of some aspect of online auctions. The goal here is to learn something from downloaded data, or data you obtain yourself in experiments. Examples:
   • Effects of special features on eBay, such as featured item listing, highlighting, bold face, etc.
   • Use of Buy-It-Now feature on eBay
   • Effects of listing choices on eBay, such as time of listing, length of auction, opening bid, hidden reserve, reputation, shipping costs, use of PayPal, etc.
   • Cross-venue comparison of like items, such as Penbid vs. eBay
   • Cross-venue study of the effect of extending deadlines vs. sharp deadlines
   • Correlation of slabbed (US) coin prices with third-party certification companies (for example, click here for a fourth party's comments on the third party companies.) Are there any other categories with third-party certifications?
   • To what extent are auctions in certain specialized areas and closing times becoming completely determined by snipers, and hence in some sense equivalent to Vickrey auctions? Here's an example:

         Started Mar-11-02 18:44:35 PST
         Ends Mar-18-02 18:44:35 PST
     
     Bidding History (Highest bids first) 
     
      User ID                     Bid Amount Date of Bid 
     
      ken@cs.princeton.edu (182)  $54.00     Mar-18-02 18:44:25 PST
      tranquillina (66)           $53.00     Mar-18-02 18:44:29 PST
      toturp@msn.com (41)         $36.02     Mar-18-02 18:44:18 PST
      factorco (52)               $21.00     Mar-18-02 05:14:33 PST
     

   • Do buyers and sellers in particular subareas tend to gather at certain auction ending times? I suspect so, and this would be analogous to like businesses accumulating in certain sections of cities (the diamond exchange in NYC, for example, or the fishmarket).
   
   
3. Simulation or numerical study of equilibrium strategies in cases too complicated to analyze. Examples:
   • Equilibria and revenue ranking in hard-to-analyze cases: Interdependent values, combinatorial auctions, risk averse bidders, asymmetrical bidders, spiteful bidders, etc.
   • Effect of market-clearing mechanisms in repeated double-auctions
   • Learning in auction-based competition
   • Automated fraud detection
   
   
4. Sociological, legal, or ethical studies of internet auctions. Analysis of the impact of auctions in these fields. Examples:
   • Fraud
   • Ethical boundaries of behavior: collusion, shilling, sniping, baiting, etc.
   • Legal aspects of internet auctions: international considerations, libel, copyright, general intellectual property issues, etc.
   • Ethical boundaries of sale items: human organs, items objectionable on grounds of politics, race, gender, etc.
   • Study the self-policing of a subarea of eBay by looking for news groups and their possible effects on bidding. (For example, in coins, there's a "fakes" newsgroup.)
   
   
5. Theoretical
   • Given an auction mechanism with expected profit functional EP(bidding strategy), call it transitive if, in pairwise matches, EP(A) ≥ EP(B) and EP(B) ≥ EP(C) ⇒ EP(A) ≥ EP(C), for all bidding strategies A, B, and C. Which auctions are transitive? Any? Do you have to restrict the class of strategies? Start with IPV auctions and uniform distributions. Does this explain results in some of our in-class tournaments, in which the rank-k contestant won (n-k) matches?
   • (Thanks to D. Stavens) Study Princeton's Registrar's own "web bidding" for limited enrollment courses. The budget constraints. These may result in NP-complete problems for the registrar! The general subject of what are called "combinatorial" auctions would be interesting to study and review.