We study a competitive supply marketplace where multiple suppliers offer a single nondifferentiated product to multiple buyers. Within this multi-supplier, multi-buyer marketplace, each buyer chooses the supply partner that serves the buyer’s order profile, described by his order size and delivery frequency, with the best price. Suppliers differ from each other in terms of their logistic cost s...

Increasingly, buyers are turning to the use of online, reverse auctions in their negotiation activities with suppliers. How does the use of these price competition mechanisms impact buyer-supplier relationships? We consider this question in the context of a quasi-experiment involving six reverse auctions conducted in the supply base of a major industrial buyer. The results indicate that online,...

Recently fixed pricing and auctions have been brought together in a new pricing format that offers bidders the option of prematurely ending an auction at a fixed price. The growing popularity of auctions presents an interesting pricing decision for managers: whether to sell at a fixed price, in a regular auction, or through a buy-it-now auction. This paper studies eBay’s buy-it-now auction and ...

In the present study, the effects of bioethanolunleaded gasoline blends on engine performance were investigated in a spark ignition engine. Fuel containing 100% ethanol (E100), fuel blend containing 40% bioethanol by volume (E40) and 100% unleaded gasoline (E0) were tested and the test results were compared. As the result of the study, it was found that the use of unleaded gasoline and bioethan...

Our objective is to assess personal income under perfect competition, when factors are rewarded according to their productivities, and to contrast the ensuing distribution with the status quo. Competition will yield winners and losers, both in terms of factor claims and in terms of regions or provinces. Income differences will press people to migrate. To analyze this, we divide China into 30 in...

Until its sales of a product materialize, a firm is a “pre-producer” in the market for that product. That firm may may be a new start-up, or it may already sell other products. Firms that do not succeed in generating sales eventually become discouraged and move on to other activities. When this fate befalls a lot of firms, as it recently did in several IT-related businesses, the indistry experi...

With the technical development of the reading equipment, e-books have witnessed a gradual and steady increase in sales in recent years. Last year, smart phones announced to be able to perform additional functions as e-book reading devices, making it possible for retailers selling e-books for smart phones (SPR) such as iPhone to differentiate with those selling e-books for specific reading equip...

Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) devices are much more expensive in Japan than in the United States, but their prices were reduced in April 2002. This study evaluated the impact of that change in the price of PCI devices on medical expenses. In-hospital costs of 22 consecutive patients who underwent elective single-vessel PCI without a debulking procedure before April 2002 were collecte...