There are numerous places to buy, sell and trade video games. But Valu Valu --  founded last summer by two Frenchmen who sold their mobile search startup to Microsoft --  is jumping into the mix with a new offering that uses the same dynamic pricing technologies popularized by the airlines more than 30 years ago.

Unlike online auction sites such as eBay, Valu Valu automatically sets the pricing on select video game titles. "On eBay, it is very difficult for casual sellers to determine a price," said co-founder Emmanuel Marot, who after selling MotionBridge to Microsoft in 2006 served as director of mobile search at the software giant.

Marot -- who describes himself as a "startup guy" -- came up with the idea for Valu Valu after growing frustrated trying to set the price for his son's bike on Craigslist. Unfamiliar with the market for American kids' bikes, Marot said he initially set the price too high. "I am not in the bicycle business," explains Marot, who then started kicking around ideas about game theory, revenue management techniques and other principles to try to figure out the proper pricing for goods. Valu Valu is the result of that brainstorm.

Publicly unveiled last week, Marot said that Valu Valu is based on the same pricing concepts that the airlines use to determine ticket prices. Pricing changes based on supply and demand, so selected versions of Madden NFL for the Wii (currently selling on the site for $12.24) and Need for Speed for the Xbox (currently selling for $9.89) reflect the "true market value."

He focused on video games because they are relatively cheap to send, allowing the company to scale the business globally and test the pricing engine in a niche market. (Obviously, it would be a little tough to send a bike to a customer in France or Japan.) However, the company does plan to expand into other consumer electronic products in the future.

Marot admits that Valu Valu faces a "chicken and egg problem" since the marketplace is only valuable if it reaches a critical mass of buyers and sellers. In order to attract those users, Marot said they are pushing out their inventory of games to Google Base. Over time, he said they may try to attract some of the power sellers on eBay that specialize in video game sales. The startup also faces competition from Amazon.com, Seattle's Bonanzle and Dawdle, which calls itself the "gamer's online marketplace."

Bonanzle's Bill Harding said niche marketplaces are having an easier time attracting buyers and sellers, in part because of much simpler syndication through sites such as Oodle and Google Base. But even so, Harding said that he's not sure how much "pain" game sellers feel in pricing specific titles.

"We have a similar feature at Bonanzle that can automatically lookup prices for video games on Amazon and Yahoo with one click ... and while this feature has been used fairly often, our sellers rarely single it out as a favorite," he said.

Valu Valu plans to make money by charging high volume sellers -- those who sell five or more video games per month -- a 2.5 percent fee on all sales. Marot says that's cheaper than eBay, adding that the "risk for them is very low."

At the moment, the 2-person startup is self-funded by Marot and co-founder Bruno Botvinik, a former developer on Windows Live Search who previously co-founded MotionBridge. At the age of 40, Marot is already a startup veteran who has helped create four companies. But this is the first one he's tried in the U.S.

So, what are the differences are between entrepreneurship in France versus the U.S.?  Marot said their is more competition in the U.S., but the entrepreneurs here more collaborative and helpful. "There's a real ecosystem," he said.

And while there is less red tap in the U.S., Marot said he's simply not as familiar with how to maneuver through the system.

"The amount of red tape is smaller here, but I am accustomed to France red tape," he said.