Environmental responsibility has become an important part of doing business. Government regulations and customers’ increased awareness of environmental issues are pushing supply chain entities to reduce the negative influence of their operations on the environment. In today’s world, companies must assume joint responsibility with their suppliers for the environmental impact of their actions. In...

R auctions are fast becoming the standard for many procurement activities. In the past, the majority of such auctions have been solely price based, but increasingly attributes other than price affect the auction outcome. Specifically, the buyer uses a scoring function to compare bids and the bid with the highest score wins. We investigate two mechanisms commonly used for procurement in business...

The input to the tollbooth problem is a graph G = (V,E) and a set of m buyers Pi where each buyer is interested in buying a path Pi connecting si, ti ∈ V . Each buyer comes with a budget b(Pi), a positive real number. The problem is to set non-negative prices to the edges E of G. A buyer buys her path Pi if the sum of prices on Pi is at most her budget. If a buyer buys her path, we obtain a pro...

A revenue-maximizing monopolist is selling a single indivisible good to buyers who face a loss if a rival buyer obtains it. The rivalry is modeled through a network, an arc between a pair of buyers indicates that a buyer considers another buyer its rival, and the magnitude of the loss is the private information of each buyer. First, given a network, we characterize the optimal mechanism. Second...

A well functioning reputation and feedback system is foundational in consumer-to-consumer electronic commerce, an example of which is the electronic auction. Our interest in this paper is the analysis of the predictive power of both buyer and seller comments in determining the resolvability of transaction disputes in online auctions. Using data gathered from the eBay, Inc. reputation system, we...

In this paper we explore whether an auctioneer/buyer may benefit from introducing his transformability relationships (some goods can be transformed into others at a transformation cost) into multi-unit combinatorial reverse auctions. Thus, we quantitatively assess the potential savings the auctioneer/buyer may obtain with respect to combinatorial reverse auctions that do not consider tranformab...

This paper aims to enable the decision maker of an integrated vendor–buyer system, under Consignment Stock (CS) policy, to make the optimal/sub-optimal production/replenishment decisions where the buyer places a space limitation to the vendor and the lead-time is controllable with an extra investment. Within any production cycle, the vendor produces at a finite rate and ships the outputs to the...

This paper studies ex-ante investment incentives of a buyer (a content provider) facing a monopoly input seller (an internet service provider), who employs second-degree price discrimination. As a benchmark, we extend an adverse-selection model by a noncontractible investment stage, which allows the buyer to improve her type. The buyer underinvests due to partial rent extraction by the seller. ...

For products sold with a warranty, preventive maintenance (PM) actions by either the manufacturer and/or the buyer has an impact on the total cost for both parties. In this investigation, we use a model to study the effect of PM carried out by the buyer on non-repairable items sold under a free replacement renewing warranty, and a penalty will be incurred by the buyer if the item fails before t...

This paper explores the interplay between choice of investment type (speci…c vs. general), bargaining extensive form and endogenous outside options in the framework of incomplete contracts introduced formally in the work of Grossman, Hart and Moore. We …nd that the bargaining procedure chosen has signi…cant implications for choice of investment and for the usefulness of the assignment of proper...