Online Content Trading: Sharing Mart System and Auction Experiments

This paper introduces an operational monetary system, the Sharing Mart system, for online content trading, and discusses what it can do with a toy experiment. Sharing Mart is a virtual-money-based file sharing system in which different digital rights (e.g., view only, download and resell rights) of various file types (e.g., video, audio, graphics and documents) can be traded by means of different transaction styles (e.g., marked price transactions and S-Mart auctions). Sharing Mart is the content equivalent of stock exchange markets, eBay and Amazon. The fully operational version has been used by 250 students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. After a quick introduction to Sharing Mart, its capabilities as a testbed are illustrated by means of a multiple-winner content auction experiment. Empirical data indicate that revenue earned by selling content and probability of winning an auction are maximized as seller/buyer strategies approach the Nash equilibrium. Content sellers and buyers lacking of strategic thinking lead to revenue reductions and reductions in the success rate to win an auction, respectively.