What is Snipping

Year 2005 marks the 10th anniversary of eBay (http://www. ebay.com), the most successful online marketplace for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) Internet auctions in this decade. As of December 2005, eBay has a major auction Web site and 26 sister Web sites operating all over the world and is enjoying a 37% quarterto- quarter growth in revenue (eBay, 2005). Before eBay existed, Internet auctions were mainly held in Internet forums and newsgroups (Lucking-Reiley, 1999, 2000). Nowadays, people can auction goods in cyberspace through Web sites such as eBay, Yahoo! auction (http:// auctions.yahoo.com), and Amazon auction(http://s1.amazon. com). Designated Web sites for niche markets, such as antiques or electronic products are also established. With the rapid growth of Internet auctions, economists and information systems (IS) researchers are using these Web sites to conduct field experiments and to collect transaction records to support their research more and more frequently. They are also interested in analyzing new features developed by these Web sites, such as Peer Review System and Buy-It- Now (BIN) auction, and bidders’ behaviors, such as snipping. This article aims to provide a brief review of the Internet auction research conducted in the past few years and to explore the future research trends in this area.