A buyer-seller protocol for content rights protection deters dishonest buyers from illegally distributing bought content. This can be achieved by giving the seller the capability to trace and identify these buyers, while also allowing the seller to prove illegal acts to a third party. Many protocols have been proposed, one of the most recent being the protocol of Ahmed et al. in the EURASIP Jou...

Multi agent system (MAS) model has been extensively used in the different tasks of E-Commerce such as customer relation management (CRM), negotiation and brokering. The objective of this paper is to evaluate a seller agent’s various cognitive parameters like capability, trust, and desire. After selecting a best seller agent from ordering queue, it applies negotiation strategies to find the most...

We study a buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value he does not know, but the seller cannot credibly reveal this value without disclosing the information itself. Information comes as divisible hard evidence. We show how the seller can appropriate a substantial fraction of the value through g...

A buyer wishes to purchase a good from a seller who chooses a sequence of prices over time. In each period, the buyer can also exercise an outside option such as moving onto another seller. We show there is a unique equilibrium in which the seller charges a constant price in every period equal to the monopoly price against their residual demand. This result contravenes the Coase conjecture.

Functional relationship between supplier and buyer in an open market place leads to investigate the role of both quantifiable and non-quantifiable parameters in coordination mechanism with the aim of achieving higher performance in supply chain activities. Here, we develop a supply chain model and a new agent to analyze and simulate the players’ behavior in the network. A cooperative game theor...

Based on a supply chain framework, we study the stocking decision of a downstream buyer who receives private demand information and has the incentive to influence her capital market valuation. We first characterize a market equilibrium under a general, single buy-back contract. We show that the buyer’s stocking decision can be distorted in equilibrium. Such a downstream stocking distortion hurt...

We study a model in which heterogenous agents first form a trading network where link formation is costless. Then, a seller and a buyer are randomly selected among the agents to bargain through a chain of intermediaries. We determine both the trading path and the allocation of the surplus among the seller, the buyer and the intermediaries at equilibrium. We show that a trading network is pairwi...

We study a model in which the seller of an indivisible object faces two potential buyers and makes an offer to either of them in each period. We find that the seller’s ability to extract surplus from them depends crucially on the value of the cost of switching from one buyer to the next. If the seller is pessimistic about the buyers’ valuations and there is a switching cost, however small, then...