Does Buyer Experience Pay Off? Evidence from eBay

This study explores the relationship between buyer experience and final price in Internet auctions for a homogenous product. We find that more experienced buyers are able to purchase a homogenous product at lower prices, on average, compared to relatively less experienced buyers. The findings are robust to how we account for instances when auctions fail to result in a sale or when they end via the "Buy it Now" option. This result supports findings from the experimental auction literature on auction performance and experience using real auction data.