Due to the immateriality of financial services and products they lend themselves handsomely for sale on the WWW. This may be one of the main reasons why the financial services industry has gained a cutting edge in the net with respect to other industries. Thus, at the beginning of the third millennium, the market for financial services is undergoing a fundamental shift since it is questionable ...

We study a model where retailers endogenously engage in both promotional advertising to attract loyal customers as well as informational advertising, which consists of deciding whether and what price to list on a price comparison site. We derive a symmetric subgame perfect equilibrium of the model and study the limiting properties of equilibrium prices, promotion, and listing decisions as the n...

We report the results of a high-energy laser calorimeter comparison conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder, Colorado and the U.S. Air Force Primary Standards laboratory (AFPSL), Heath, Ohio. A laser power meter, used as a transfer standard, was calibrated at each laboratory, sequentially, and the measurement results were compared. These measurements were...

In cross-cultural research, researchers have to adjust the constructs and associated measurement instruments that have been developed in one culture and then imported for use in another culture. Importing concepts from other cultures is often simply reduced to language adjustment of the content in the items of the measurement instruments that define a certain (psychological) construct. In the c...

The general perception that laboratory markets yield efficient competitive outcomes seems to contradict the emphasis on market imperfections that pervades much of the theoretical work in industrial organization. This apparent contradiction is resolved by considering the effects of trading institutions: Competitive outcomes are indeed typical in laboratory markets where trading follows the "doub...

Robin Nunn has argued that we should stop using the terms ‘placebo’ and ‘placebo effect’. I argue in support of Nunn’s position by considering the logic of why we perform placebo comparisons. Like all comparisons, placebo comparison is just a case of comparing one thing with another, but it is a mistake, I argue, to think of placebo comparison as a case where something is compared to ‘a placebo...

We study a firm selling two products/services, which are differentiated solely in their prices and delivery times, to two different customer segments in a capacitated environment. From a demand perspective, when both products are available to all customers, they act as substitutes, affecting each other’s demand. Customized products for each segment, on the other hand, result in independent dema...

Price comparison sites (shopbots) are supposed to create price transparent markets. Nevertheless, online prices are still very dispersed, making the question when and how customers are influenced by price transparency the key for understanding electronic channels. This study is the first empirical investigation of this question using transaction data from the largest online retailer Amazon and ...

The settlement rule used to determine payments in electricity market auctions can have a profound impact on the amount paid for a particular service. This paper evaluates two auction settlement rules: the uniform price auction in which the last offer accepted determines the price paid to all participants and the discriminatory price auction in which each participant is paid the amount bid by th...