The Internet has dramatically changed how people sell and buy goods. In recent years we have seen the emergence of electronic marketplaces that leverage information technology to create more efficient markets such as online auctions to bring together buyers and sellers with greater effectiveness and at a massive scale. A potential threat to the effectiveness of massive scale online marketplaces...

In an original data set of goods listed for sale online, I observe that multiple selling mechanisms are popular with buyers and sellers in the compact disc market. I construct a model to explain how heterogeneous sellers choose between selling in an auction versus posting a …xed price. An important contribution of this work is that I model competing sellers instead of a monopolist. In doing so,...

This experimental study examines whether the content of information and the timing of its dissemination affects firms’ market power. We construct laboratory markets that capture the key features of a price-setting, differentiated goods, duopoly model analyzed by Anderson and Renault (2000). Consumers must typically incur a search cost in order to obtain any information, but a fraction of the co...

T paper offers a systematic exploration of reputation mechanism design in trading environments with opportunistic sellers of commonly known cost and ability parameters, imperfect monitoring of a seller’s actions, and two possible seller effort levels, one of which has no value to buyers. The objective of reputation mechanisms in such pure moral hazard settings is to induce sellers to exert high...

The electronic marketplace is a new medium for exchanging information, goods, services, and payments. It houses infrastructure, facilitates transactions, and matches buyers with sellers. A mobile-agent-based marketplace allows corporate data to be maintained by local buyers and sellers and transferred to the marketplace only when orders are matched. This provides the participating companies wit...

By employing dynamic pricing, sellers have the potential to increase their revenue by selling their goods at prices customized to the buyers’ demand, the market environment, and the seller’s supply at the moment of the transaction. As dynamic pricing becomes a necessary competitive maneuver, and as market mechanisms become more complex, there is a growing need for software agents to be used to ...

Online auctions have become one of the fastest growing modes of onlinecommerce transactions. eBay has 94 million active members buying and selling goods at a staggering rate. These auctions are also producing large amounts of data that can be utilized to provide services to the buyers and sellers, market research, and product development. We collect historical auction data from eBay and use mac...

1 1 The authors thank the participants of the Cowles Foundation Conference ''Repeated Games with Private Monitoring'' for helpful remarks. Detailed comments by two anonymous referees and an associate editor greatly improved the note. The authors acknowledge financial support from NSF Grants 9709887 and 9709340, respectively. The second author thanks the Helsinki School of Economics for its hosp...

Hedonic price regressions have become a standard tool to study how prices of commodity goods are related to quality attributes. In this paper, we extend the traditional price specification by incorporating three sources of unobserved heterogeneity related to sellers, buyers, and matches between buyers and sellers. The extended price specification is estimated on a unique exhaustive dataset of n...

We propose a formal approach to Ontology-Based Semantic Matchmaking between Skills request and offer, devised as a virtual marketplace of knowledge. In such a knowledge market metaphor, skills are a peculiar kind of goods that have distinguishing characteristics with respect to traditional assets. Buyers are entities that need the skills of people, such as projects, departments and organization...