Robert Zeithammer

Robert Zeithammer is at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He received a PhD in Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MA in Mathematics as well BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught the Marketing Strategy course at the GSB.

His research focuses on auction-driven marketplaces like eBay. Auction-driven marketplaces are collections of auctions related in the mind of the buyer, usually through mutual substitutability of the objects sold. In such marketplaces, the burden of pricing is on the interplay between buyers' bidding strategies and the seller's selling strategies, and Robert is working on models that capture the essence of such interplay and help us understand the nature of these emerging marketplaces, in particular the relationship between optimal selling and optimal bidding.

For example, when substitutable objects are sold in a sequence one after the other, as they are on eBay, buyers can benefit from fairly complicated forward-looking bidding strategies that take upcoming supply of the goods into account. In his PhD thesis, Robert demonstrated that eBay bidders seem to take such information about the future into account consistently with rational models. Moreover, such behavior on the part of the buyers implies a need for the sellers to alter their way of selling related objects because the better buyers are in forward-looking bidding, the lower the profits of the sellers, and hence the lower the incentive to sell in the first place. Robert's current research is aimed at understanding how sellers make the decision whether to auction an item or whether to offer it for sale for a fixed price.