The calendar effect of price-reduction auction of online agricultural products

摘要

In the last several years, the agricultural electronic commerce sales model is becoming increasingly popular and mature in China. Shan Xi GongTianXia E-Commerce Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as 'GongTianXia'), the country's largest company of agricultural products in the field of B2C e-commerce, launched two auction patterns on the platform Wechat known as '7-day auction' and '15-minute auction' at the end of 2014. In order to increase trade volume and profit, GongTianXia attract mass attention of customers to agricultural products with these two sales patterns. Using over 200,000 transaction histories from 2015 including 432 instances of '7-day auction' and 943 instances of '15-minute auction', this paper discusses the influences of different types of commodities under the above two auction patterns of several significant time points, then explains the underlying reason for those influences. With the findings, we can make some improvements for calendar effect theory. Besides that, a theoretical complement will be also made for Dutch auction used in e-commerce market of agricultural products, and also can give advice on optimisation of related companies.