Abstract: With the rapid development of information technology, the online auction has broken the limitation of time and space for traditional auction, and greatly expanded the time and space of auction. Then, more customers would like to sell their goods to obtain revenue through the online auction sites such as "eBay.com". With the innovation of online auction format, the online buyout-price auction, including fixed buyout-price, temporary and permanent buyout-price, has been widely applied in online auction business. In practice, the temporary buyout-price auction is a common format of the online buyout-price auction. From the seller point of view, it is important for him/her to estimate the revenue when using the temporary buyout-price auction to sell goods. At present, in most research of online auction, bidders are assumed to be perfect rationality, but previous research has shown that, in a complex and uncertain environment, bidders usually exhibit bounded rationality behavior and such behavior will have impacts on the seller's revenue. Thus, it is a noteworthy research topic how to conduct the seller's revenue analysis and set the buyout price in the temporary buyout-price auction with consideration of the situation that bidders are bounded rationality. In this paper, we assume that the bidders are bounded rationality. For the baseline study, we first analyze the bidder's optimal strategy in the temporary buyout-price auction under the assumption of perfect rationality, and construct the seller's expected revenue model. Then, the bidding probability-based function for bidders' behavior choice is adopted to characterize the bidders' behavior with bounded rationality. On such base, a seller's expected revenue model is constructed by incorporating the concept of bidder's bounded rationality behavior into the model for consideration. Furthermore, according to the model, the numerical experiments are conducted to investigate the impacts of three factors (buyout price, number of bidders and degree of bounded rationality) on the seller's revenue, and the seller's expected revenue under the assumption of bounded rationality and perfect rationality are analyzed and compared. By the analysis of seller's revenue and the results of the numerical experiments, some important conclusions are obtained, as well as some managerial insights. Moreover, an example is used to illustrate the feasibility and its potential application of the seller's expected revenue model. Through the theoretical analysis, we find that the seller's expected revenue is related to not only the buyout price but also the bidder's bounded rationality behavior, which bridges the gap between the seller's revenue and the bidder's psychological behavior. The seller's revenue with consideration of bidder's bounded rationality behavior is almost more than the one based on the assumption of bidder's perfect rationality. In addition, when the buyout price is low and the number of bidders is large, the seller will obtain more revenue from the temporary buyout-price auction. To effectively estimate seller's revenue from the temporary buyout-price auction, it is necessary to take into account some crucial influence, such as buyout price, number of bidders, degree of bounded rationality, operational cost and auction participation cost. The seller's expected revenue model proposed by this paper provides guidance for analyzing and estimating the seller's revenue in the real online temporary buyout-price auction considering the bidder's bounded rationality behavior. This paper enriches the theory of online auction and can be studied and applied more widely.

Key words: online temporary buyout-price auction, bounded rationality, bidding strategy, expected revenue