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Penny Auctions are Predictable: Predicting and Profiling User Behavior on DealDash

Published: 03 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We study user behavior and the predictability of penny auctions, auction sites often criticized for misrepresenting themselves as low-price auction marketplaces. Using a 166-day trace of 134,568 auctions involving 174 million bids on DealDash, the largest penny auction site in service, we show that a) both the timing and source of bids are highly predictable, and b) users are easily classified into clear behavioral groups by their bidding behavior, and such behaviors correlate highly with the eventual profitability of their bidding strategies. This suggests that penny auction sites are vulnerable to modeling and adversarial attacks.

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  • (2019)Machine Learning for Security and the Internet of Things: The Good, the Bad, and the UglyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29489127(158126-158147)Online publication date: 2019

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cover image ACM Conferences
HT '18: Proceedings of the 29th on Hypertext and Social Media
July 2018
266 pages
ISBN:9781450354271
DOI:10.1145/3209542
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 July 2018

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Author Tags

  1. clustering
  2. online auctions
  3. sequence prediction
  4. user behavior

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HT '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 69 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 378 of 1,158 submissions, 33%

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  • (2019)Machine Learning for Security and the Internet of Things: The Good, the Bad, and the UglyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29489127(158126-158147)Online publication date: 2019

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