Towards workload characterization of auction sites

The popularity of online auctions is growing with the participation of businesses and individual customers in various forms of auctions to buy and sell goods and services. This form of electronic commerce is expected to grow and become a significant form of exchange of goods and services competing in a global scale with traditional fixed-price commerce. A good understanding of the workload of auction sites should provide insights about their activities and help in the process of designing business-oriented metrics and designing novel resource management policies based on these metrics. This paper provides a workload characterization of auction sites including i) a multi-scale analysis of auction traffic and bid activity within auctions, ii) a closing time analysis in terms of number of bids and price variation within auctions, iii) the characteristics of the auction winner in terms of entry time, entry price, and bidding activity, and iv) unique bidder analysis.