Affective Images, Emotion Regulation and Bidding Behavior: An Experiment on the Influence of Competition and Community Emotions in Internet Auctions

Internet auction sites frequently employ images as design elements on their websites in order to either induce a sense of community or competition among the bidders. In this paper, we investigate the impact of such affective images on bidding behavior in a controlled laboratory experiment during which participants' emotional processes are assessed through psychophysiological measurements. Immediately before placing a bid in a first-price...