Conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when there are multiple district elections for a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters: an extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred by the median voter in a majority o...

We consider a multilateral bargaining game in which the agents can be classified into two groups according to their instantaneous preferences. In one of these groups there is one agent with a different discount factor. We analyze how this time-preference heterogeneity may generate multiplicity of equilibria. When such an agent is sufficiently more patient than the rest, there is an equilibrium ...

Firms sometimes try to “poach” the current customers of their competitors by offering them special inducements to switch. We analyze duopoly poaching under both short-term and long-term contracts in two polar cases: either each consumer’s brand preferences are constant from one period to the next, or preferences are independent over time. With fixed preferences, poaching induces socially ineffi...

Given a finite set of products with varying prices and costs, stochastic demand and customer preferences, we consider the problem of determining the optimal assortment and inventory levels in order to maximize expected profit in a single-period. We model customer preferences through the definition of customer types, where a type is a ranking of the potential products by order of preference. A c...

Online consumers are known to be impatient. It is therefore critical for merchant websites to offer relevant recommendations quickly and with minimal customer input to their online visitors. Recommending pertinent items to first-time visitors, however, is particularly challenging. In this paper, we show how conjoint analysis can be leveraged to design a recommender system that elicits customers...

In this paper, a method is described for user self-profiling when engaged in e-commerce over the Internet, by which customers can have greater control over profiles relating to their behaviour or preferences and can exploit this information without revealing their identity. This is achieved using trusted agents that exploit Trusted Computing Platform technology (cf. www.trustedpc.org).

E-commerce customers demand quick and easy access to suitable products in large purchase spaces. To support and facilitate this purchasing process to users, recommender systems (RSs) help them to find out the information that best fits their preferences and needs in an overloaded search space. These systems require the elicitation of customers’ preferences. However, this elicitation process is ...

We present an implemented customer oriented online shopping system called HOPE (Helpful Online Purchase Environment). Data mining methods are used to automatically generate suggestions, which vary according to the customer and section being browsed. Customers receive personalized suggestions that match their own purchasing habits and preferences.

W report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the film rental and return patterns of a sample of online DVD rental customers over a period of four months. We predict and find that s...

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies caused by superior information of sellers about the surplus-maximising quality. While standard theory predicts that equal mark-up prices solve the credence goods problem if customers can verify the quality received, experimental evidence indicates the opposite. We identify a lack of robustness with respect to heterogeneity in social preferences ...