Recently, there is a rapid growth of the online auctions in e-commerce

  platforms, in which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) heavily depend

  on the advertising systems. We need to design flexible price mechanisms to

  reduce the competition of SMEs without affecting competitive large companies.

  In this paper, a probabilistic price mechanism design approach is investigated

  for online auctions. Utilizing this approach, we first introduce simple

  mechanisms as a tool for designing new mechanisms. Based on a simple and a

  classical mechanism probabilistic price mechanisms are designed for online

  auctions and their properties are analysed. Furthermore, two mechanism design

  algorithms are suggested for different online auction scenarios. Experiments

  are presented to demonstrate the flexibility and the effictiveness of the

  proposed probabilistic mechanism design approach.