Recent studies of cartel operation show that in most cartels both sales and price data were private information, and side payments between firms were used in addition to price wars to enforce collusion. This paper proposes a simple mechanism for collusion enforcement that incorporates these features. The mechanism applies to both price and quantity competition, and it allows for multi-product f...

Economic theory provides a unique vantage point from which to examine issues with respect to emerging technologies, where standards and adoption, business process changes and implementation outcomes, information security, investments and business value, and industry impact require care and consideration on the part of senior management strategists and financial services leaders. In this article...

Researchers are particularly interested in factors that affect the adoption, innovations and diffusion of mobile payment, which is a typical and wide application of ICTS (Information Communication Technology Services) in developed and developing countries. Though mobile payment is an exciting domain and rapidly evolved in recent years, the existence of standardized, interconnected and widely-ac...

Crémer and McLean [1] and McAfee and Reny [3] showed that, in “nearly all auctions”, the seller can offer a mechanism that obtains full rent extraction. The mechanism designed by Crémer and McLean differs from standard procedures in several respects. Notably, (a) bidders are required to buy “lotteries” in order to partecipate at the auction; (b) bidders are treated non-anonymously, in the sense...

Payments in kind pose an enduring and empirically important puzzle. The paper provides a formalization of the popular view that payments in kind are due to financial constraints. The key assumption is that buyers’ liquidity is private information. Buyers who are financially constrained may prove their hardship by making part of the payment in kind. The paper models explicitly the credit market ...

Markets (electronic or otherwise) have three main functions, summarized in Table 1: matching buyers and sellers; facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services and payments associated with market transactions; and providing an institutional infrastructure, such as a legal and regulatory framework, that enables the efficient functioning of the market. In a modern economy, the first tw...

This paper studies optimal relational contracts when the value of the relationship between contracting parties is not commonly known. I consider a principal-agent setting where the principal has persistent private information about her outside option. I show that if the principal has the bargaining power, she wants to understate her outside option to provide strong incentives and then renege on...

The proliferation of new payment methods on the Internet rekindles the old and unsettled debate about merchants’ incentive and ability to differentiate price according to payment choice. This paper develops an imperfect-information framework for the analysis of platform and social regulation of card surcharging and cash discounting. It makes three main contributions. First, it identifies the co...

The most important phase in E–Commerce interactions is the payment, due to the transfer of sensitive information (e.g., credit card numbers). A couple of requirements exist both from the point of view of a customer and from the merchant’s perspective. This set of requirements is even enlarged when complex interactions are considered in which a customer purchases goods originating from different...