The developments of the Digital Economy will have a fundamental impact on the structures and processes of economic systems. Within this new economy the importance of the creation and maintenance of a relationship between a customer and a supplier is increasing, but the way to handle this relationship is changing. Therefore, we focus on the upcoming challenges to relationships between suppliers ...

Incentive strategies are used in collaborative user-centric networks, the functioning of which depends on the willingness of users to cooperate. Classical mechanisms stimulating cooperation are based on trust, which allows to set up a reputation infrastructure quantifying the subjective reliance on the expected behavior of users, and on virtual currency, which allows to monetize the effect of p...

A theory is presented which predicts that performance will stabilize at an equilibrium level in a long-term token economy. This prediction is based on the joint consideration of consumption schedules (relationships between income and expenditure) and a hypothesized critical range of savings (a range of savings above which performance deteriorates and below which performance improves). Procedure...

When a firm changes its unique mix of products, markets, and technologies, some of employees’ previously acquired human capital depreciates. As a result, the firm can credibly renegotiate down employees’ quasi rents, which it had promised them as a reward for their human capital investments. We show that linking employees’ pay to total firm value, a widely observed phenonemon in practice, can m...

This paper analyzes the real effects of differences in structures on financial markets, especially concerning quasi-equilibrium unemployment. It argues that a vibrant venture capital market is an important prerequisite for financing structural change and thus for keeping unemployment low in the ongoing transition to the “new economy”. It furthermore points out the crucial importance of extensiv...

Economics-related ICT research has moved from the fringes of the discipline to penetrate all of its branches. It is, therefore, not a separate economics sub-discipline. It is also unlikely to become part of an ‘ICT or Internet Research’ proto-discipline. Instead, it should be seen as only one part of a bigger agenda toward a proper ‘information and knowledge economics’ and possibly a future pro...

Exergy analysis is based on combined first and second laws of thermodynamics and is a useful tool to analyze the energy systems in a better and more realistic way than an energy analysis, based on the first law of thermodynamics. Combination of exergy from thermodynamics with conventional concepts from engineering economy which is referred to as thermo-economy (exergo-economy) is a valuable too...