--- begin forwarded text Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 00:04:02 -0700 To: dcsb@ai.mit.edu Subject: Economist on Net.Auctions From: nobody@huge.cajones.com (Huge Cajones Remailer) Comments: Please report misuse of this automated remailing service to <remailer-admin@cajones.com> Sender: bounce-dcsb@ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: nobody@huge.cajones.com (Huge Cajones Remailer) no earth-shattering revelations, but tuesday's audience should do their class reading for the pop quiz.. Going, going . . . THE Internet may have been the playground of the geeks for the past few decades, but its future belongs to an even more child-like tribe: economists. The network is becoming the ideal marketplace, where legions of buyers and sellers, both armed to the teeth with relevant information, can set prices as efficiently as any trading floor. As a result, market theories that have long been confined to business-school computer simulations can now have their day of reckoning as real people exchange real goods and money on-line. Nowhere is this better seen than with the economists' favourite sort of market: auctions. More than 150 auction sites are now open on the Web, selling everything from industrial machinery to rare stamps. Airlines such as Cathay Pacific and American have auctioned spare seats on their Web sites. AuctionWeb, which is a mixture of a classified-ad service and an auction room for people selling everything from rare Barbie dolls to barbecue grills, conducted 330,000 auctions on-line in the first quarter of this year alone. Onsale, the largest on-line auction service and one of the few profitable ones, sells $6m worth of computer equipment and electronic goods a month. Last month it became the first on-line auction firm to hit the stockmarket, going public at a valuation of nearly $100m. The Internet's chief advantage for auctioneers is the size of its audience. Its global reach brings a critical mass of buyers and sellers to the most popular auction sites, avoiding the problem of insufficient trading that bedevils many of their cousins in the physical world. Indeed, quick, easy virtual auctions carry a hint of the sort of hyper-efficient capitalism that Internet fans have long been promised. read the rest at http://www.economist.com/issue/31-05-97/wb8772.html For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-request@ai.mit.edu" with one line of text: "help". --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/