Hockey cards on eBay: Are the cards of international players less valuable?

The National Hockey League is considered by its fans to be the premier professional hockey league in the world.  Team are located in the U.S. and Canada, but increasingly the team rosters have become more international.  The primary research question of the paper is whether the country of origin effects the value of a player’s sports card on eBay.  The paper uses the usual eBay auction variables (minimum price, seller feedback, shipping and handling, the buy-it-now feature use, etc.) to examine their effect on whether an item sold, the number of bids, and the final price (both with and without bids as an independent variable).  Player performance measures and price guide variables may also be included as control variables.  The auction data comes from the U.S. eBay site, “Sports Memorabilia, Cards, and Fan Shop, Cards, Hockey, Singles.  Price guide variables are from Beckett.com.  Since “item sold” is a binary variable, the first regression uses logit analysis.    The bids regression is estimated using the Poisson model for count data because the bid data is a discrete variable limited to small values.  The final sales price regressions are estimated using a left-censored Tobit.  The anticipated results will address the question of whether tastes and preferences of buyers reflect the country of origin of a particular player.  Given that most of the eBay buyers are from the United States, there may be a premium for players from the United States.  Prices may also be higher for Canadian players since buyers should be more familiar with these players since they are also of North American origin.  For the players from Europe, the predictions are more complex.  First, it is predicted that in general, players of European origin will have lowers prices than players from North America.  However, what about the specific European country a player hails from?   The European counties which most commonly contribute players to the NHL are Sweden, Russia, Finland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.  Do players from the Nordic countries receive a higher price premium than the players from Slavic countries?  Of the Slavic countries, do Russian, Czech or Slovak players receive a premium?  These are the questions to be answered by the analysis.  Though the NHL has become a much more cosmopolitan league in terms of player origin, it still remains to be seen if there is more value given to players of North American origin.