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Benford’s Law and Naturally Occurring Prices in Certain ebaY Auctions

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Author Info
David E. Giles () (Department of Economics, University of Victoria)

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Abstract

We show that certain the winning bids for certain ebaY auctions obey Benford’s Law. One implication of this is that it is unlikely that these bids are subject to collusion among bidders, or “shilling” on the part of sellers. Parenthetically, we also show that numbers from the naturally occurring Fibonacci and Lucas sequences also obey Benford’s Law.

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File URL: http://web.uvic.ca/econ/research/papers/ewp0505.pdf
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics, University of Victoria in its series Econometrics Working Papers with number 0505.

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Length: 10 pages
Date of creation: 17 May 2005
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:vic:vicewp:0505

Note: ISSN 1485-6441
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Postal: PO Box 1700, STN CSC, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 2Y2
Phone: (250)721-8540
Fax: (250)721-6214
Web page: http://web.uvic.ca/econ
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Related research
Keywords: Benford’s Law; auction prices; football; Kuiper test; Watson test;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
C12 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Hypothesis Testing
C14 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods
C16 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Econometric and Statistical Methods; Specific Distributions
D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Auctions

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Ley, Eduardo & Varian, Hal R, 1994. "Are There Psychological Barriers in the Dow-Jones Index?," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 4(3), pages 217-24, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. David E. A. Giles, 2006. "The Exact Asymptotic Distribution Function of Watson's UN-Squared for Testing Goodness-of-Fit With Circular Discrete Data," Econometrics Working Papers 0607, Department of Economics, University of Victoria. [Downloadable!]
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