Empirical research of online auctions such as eBay has been dominated by researchers from economics and information systems. Together with colleagues from Information Systems and statistics, I have been working on developing statistical methods for visualizing, collecting, modeling, predicting and analyzing such data. Bid data (and other types of eCommerce data) have non-standard structures and therefore require careful and specialized methods. The wedding of eCommerce data with a statistical approach is leading to innovations in Statistics as well as in eCommerce. Two examples (see more relevant publications):

• We've developed with colleagues from the UMD Human-Computer Interaction Lab an advanced auction visualization tool.
• Using state-of-the art approach of functional data analysis (FDA), we develop approaches for capturing, visualizing, modeling, and predicting auction dynamics (see article in research@smith).