In this paper, we investigate the use of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to the problem of determining dynamic prices in an electronic retail market. As representative models, we consider a single seller market and a two seller market, and formulate the dynamic pricing problem in a setting that easily generalizes to markets with more than two sellers. We first formulate the single seller...

In many instances of price discrimination, a seller of an item is in possession of signals from competing buyers regarding their private valuation for the item. While intuition may suggest that a seller should always exploit all available information, our paper shows that it is actually in the interests of the seller to strategically ignore the information contained in the signals with positive...

To explain, the ratings provided by advisors are possibly unfair. Buyers may provide unfairly high ratings to promote the seller. This is referred to as “ballot stuffing” (Dellarocas 2000). Buyers may also provide unfairly low ratings, in order to cooperate with other sellers to drive a seller out of the marketplace. This is referred to as “bad-mouthing”. Besides the problem of unfair ratings, ...

Motivated by applications in the health insurance industry, we consider a seller who designs and sells a set of vertically differentiated products to a population of quality-sensitive customers. The seller’s business environment entails an uncertainty about production costs. We characterize the seller’s optimal price-quality schedule in the cases of: (a) static cost uncertainty, and (b) dynamic...

Reputation models depend on the ratings provided by buyers to gauge the reliability of sellers in multi-agent based e-commerce environment. However, there is no prevention for the cases in which a buyer misjudges a seller, and provides a negative rating to an original satisfactory transaction. In this case, how should the seller get his reputation repaired and utility loss recovered? In this wo...

A much as 12% of the daily volume on the New York Stock Exchange, and similar volumes on other major world exchanges, involves sales by institutional investors to brokers through blind portfolio auctions. Such transactions typically take the form of a first-price sealed-bid auction in which the seller engages a few potential brokers and provides limited information about the portfolio being sol...

The recent emergence of internet-based electronic market places is changing the structure of traditional marketing channels in a fundamental way. Collaboration may increase because of lower transaction costs related with increased information availability. At the same time these same factors, through the effect they have on mutual dependency and uncertainty in the buyer-seller dyad, are conside...

— This research proposes a novel auction mechanism for transactive energy exchange between buyers and sellers, modeled as agents in a microgrid. The mechanism is implemented by a separate microgrid controller (MC) agent, and requires big data flow with the other agents through an iterative bidding process. Although private user information remains hidden to the MC, a theoretical analysis shows ...

In the environment of business‐to‐business e‐commerce, Buyers and sellers in mature industrial markets can turn single transactions into long-term beneficial relationships by a deeper understanding of the complex connection between the two and buyers and sellers are uncertain about their roles. A “must-do” for the sellers, in particular, is to understand patterns of investment and reward,...