Factors that influence a buyer's utility in online auctions: A conceptual model for studying the role of offline experiences

With a tremendous growth of online auction researches over the last several years, more and more scholars want to know what factors make individual bidders pay more or less for the same item in online auctions. Following the idea of e-commerce which considers traditional market and e-market as two separate markets, most of the researches focus on the factors of e-market. However, a customer exists in both traditional market and e-market, and his offline experience of a product may probably affect his utility to buy a product in e-market, especially for those experience products. So in this paper we theoretically emphasize the role that offline experiences of a product play and divide the offline experiences of an item into four types based on the interview with online bidders through QQ. By adding the offline experience construct to Kauffman's Online Consumer Transaction Valuation Model, we connect e-market and traditional market together and propose a conceptual model to study the factors that affect a buyer's utility in online auctions more comprehensively.