  In this paper, we aim to empirically examine the value of website usage and
sellers' listing behavior in the two leading Internet auctions sites, eBay and
Yahoo!Auctions. The descriptive data analysis of the seller's equilibrium
listing behavior indicates that a seller's higher expected auction revenue from
eBay is correlated with a lager number of potential bidders measured by website
usage per listing. Our estimation results, based on the logarithm
specifications of sellers' expected auction revenues and potential bidders'
website usage, show that in a median case, (i) 1 percent increase of the unique
visitors (page views) per listed item induces 0.022 (0.007) percent increase of
a seller's expected auction revenue; and (ii) 1 percent increase of sellers'
listings induces 1.99 (4.74) percent increase of the unique visitors (page
views). Since increased expected auction revenues will induce more listings, we
can infer positive feedback effects between the number of listings and website
usage. Consequently, Yahoo!Auctions, which has substantially less listings, has
greater incentives to increase listings via these feedback effects which are
reflected in its fee schedules.
