From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 1997 08:28:06 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Economist on Net.Auctions
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Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 00:04:02 -0700
To: dcsb@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Economist on Net.Auctions
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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

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-----------------
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/