This paper focuses on the increasing competition between resale opportunities for heterogeneous items with limited demand, i.e. long-tail products. This paper examines if commercial dealers offer higher purchase prices than purchase prices fixed in public auctions. To analyze this issue, we review options for customers to resell their belongings online after use. We use a proprietary software system to download, validate, and join item data across 14 data sources, like Amazon, eBay, and twelve commercial dealers in Germany for 1673 textbooks. We analyze the question which option to resell belongings online maximizes profit of the seller, while controlling for item, demand, supply, and auction specific characteristics. Besides a detailed analysis of the price spread, we exploit listing decisions among those resale options by non-commercial dealers and execute an arbitrage trading strategy using a purely deterministic model. We find that commercial dealers offer a higher purchase price than public auctions. We argue that commercial dealers offer these higher prices as they can shift item demand over time. In addition, prices in public auctions could be depressed because on consumer-to-consumer online auction markets a strategy called “sniping” is widespread, which might hamper the price mechanism. Our results are relevant for end-consumers who are willing to dispose of items in their belonging and for commercial dealers who want to optimize their sourcing. These results can be devolved on market microstructures of other standardized products like, for example, financial products.

本文着眼于需求有限的异类商品（即长尾产品）的转售机会之间日益激烈的竞争。本文研究了商业交易商提供的购买价格是否高于公开拍卖中确定的购买价格。为了分析此问题，我们审查了供客户使用后在线转售其财物的选项。我们使用专有的软件系统来下载，验证和联接14个数据源中的商品数据，例如Amazon，eBay和德国的12个商业经销商的1673本书。我们分析以下问题：在控制项目，需求，供应和拍卖的特定特征的同时，在线出售财产的选项可以最大化卖方的利润。除了详细分析价差外，我们利用非商业交易商在这些转售选项中的上市决策，并使用纯确定性模型执行套利交易策略。我们发现商业交易商提供的购买价格高于公开拍卖。我们认为商业交易商会提供这些较高的价格，因为它们可以随着时间的推移改变商品需求。此外，公开拍卖的价格可能会受到压制，因为在从消费者到消费者的在线拍卖市场上，一种称为“狙击”的策略广泛存在，这可能会阻碍价格机制。我们的结果与愿意处置其财产的最终消费者以及想要优化其采购的商业经销商有关。这些结果可以推论到其他标准化产品（例如金融产品）的市场微观结构。