Introduction to 'Innovative Auction Markets' Special Issue

This special issue of EM — Electronic Markets on ‘Innovative Auction Markets’ illustrates the increasingly pervasive and diverse applications of online auctions. From auctions for keywords tied to search engines, to B2B and financial auctions, or the use of auctions to generate predictive information for decision making — online auctions are becoming more widely applied in practice. Since the last special issue on auctions was guest edited in this journal by Stefan Klein in 1997, research on online auction designs and implementation has also become much more popular in information systems, marketing and economics. Online auctions have a number of advantages for the social assignation of value, trading and resource allocation. Online auctions enable: