We study the pricing strategies of firms providing a service in experience good markets with switching costs. Using data on vendors providing “hosting and related services” at an early stage of the market, we test for pricing distortions that follow from oligopolistic competition with quality uncertainty and switching costs. We find that firms with a brand name charge a premium for their produc...

This paper explores some perverse features that can emerge when social contracts are moved from a social vacuum to a setting of social interdependence. In particular we note incentives that might exist in conjunction with externality problems that yield situations in which: (1) social contracts reduce social wealth; (2) sub-global social contracts are Pareto inferior to the absence of social co...

In this paper we present an approach to check resource consumption contracts using an off-theshelf static analyzer. We propose a set of annotations to support resource usage specifications, in particular, dynamic memory consumption constraints. Since dynamic memory may be recycled by a memory manager, the consumption of this resource is not monotone. The specification language can express both ...

A theoretical optimal hedging model is developed to determine potential demand from Australian farmers for a hedging tool to remove the economic consequences of climate related variability in wheat yield. In the past, financial instruments have been developed to hedge price risk on capital markets; however, in more recent times new financial instruments, weather derivatives, have been developin...

After entering into supply contracts, ...rms often later renegotiate the terms of those contracts. For example, ...rms that obtain market demand information after signing supply contracts may bene...t by renegotiating the contracts to allow buyers facing poor market conditions to purchase less than their contractual commitment and allowing buyers facing favorable conditions to purchase more. Co...

The capability to reallocate items|e.g. tasks, securities , bandwidth slices, Mega Watt hours of electricity , and collectibles|is a key feature in automated negotiation. Especially when agents have preferences over combinations of items, this is highly nontrivial. Marginal cost based reallocation leads to an anytime algorithm where every agent's payoo increases mono-tonically over time. Diiere...

When IAEA was established as an autonomous member of the United Nations family in 1957, a prominent assignment was to "seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world". The inclusion of "health" reflected an important fact — that medical uses of radiation and radionuclides were among the first and most widespread applications...

Abstract The technology of Ethereum blockchain enables the implementation smart contracts. Nowadays contracts are one most successful applications technology, which widely used in many fields, such as finance, energy and services. decentralization immutability properties provide security for transactions from However, these possible to lead unfixable vulnerabilities In recent years, vulnerabili...

In this paper I explore wage-tenure contracts in a random search framework, where workers search on and off the job for employment opportunities similar to that of Lentz (2010) and Bagger and Lentz (2008). The worker determines the frequency by which employment opportunities arrive through a costly choice of search intensity, which is unobserved by the firm and cannot be directly contracted upo...

Programs should consist of off-the-shelf, interchangeable, black-box components that are produced by a network of independent software companies. These components should not only come with type signatures but also with contracts that describe other aspects of their behavior. One way to express contracts is to state preand postconditions for externally visible functions. These preand post-condit...