In this paper, we study a family of sales-based rebate mechanisms as an effective tool to implement price discrimination across population buyers with correlated heterogeneous valuations on indivisible goods and services. order such mechanisms, the seller charges each buyer fixed at time purchase contingent that is function ex post sales volume be realized end period. The declares both menu reb...

The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to sell his items for the highest possible prices, and each buyer wants to maximize his utility (i.e., valuation minus payment) as long as his payment does not ...

In the age of electronic commerce, with low-cost information access, it has been recognized that a bundle search in a combinatorial trade is very valuable for buyers. Optimal travel package search is one of the most prominent examples of bundle search, allowing buyers to exploit various discounts through business partnerships among sellers. There are many varieties of bundle search problem. In ...

Motivated by the growth of various networked systems as potential market places, we study market models wherein, owing to the size of the markets, transactions take place between largely unknown agents. In such scenarios, intermediaries or brokers play a significant role in a transaction. We analyze market behavior in large networks wherein all sellers are not known to the buyers and vice-versa...

We consider auction environments where bidders must incur a cost to learn their valuations. The seller chooses a mechanism which indicates for each period, as a function of the bids in previous periods, which new potential buyers should be asked to bid; it must also induce buyers both to acquire and to reveal truthfully their valuations. We prove a very general “full extraction of the surplus” ...

This paper examines the use of switching costs by long-lived strategic buyers to manage dynamic competition between rival suppliers. The analysis reveals how buyers may employ switching costs to their advantage. We show when switching costs are high a buyer may induce suppliers to price more competitively by credibly threatening to replace the incumbent supplier with his rivals. The implication...

Online auctions are a new trading model that integrates auction mechanisms and the Internet. However, during the interaction between buyers and sellers, service failures inevitably occur. When service failures occur, selecting an effective service recovery strategy to correct the failure is an important issue. In this study, 867 failure incidents from buyers of online auction service encounters...