This paper discusses a fundamental market failure regarding environmental conservation, and how the problem can be solved by appropriate policies. A "seller" (or owner of a tropical forest) may be motivated to conserve if a "buyer" is expected to pay. The buyer, however, does not find it necessary to pay as long as the seller conserves in any case. This contradiction implies that the forest wil...

We analyze endogenous capacity formation in a large frictional market with perfectly divisible goods. Each seller posts a price and decides on a capacity. The buyers base their decision on which seller to visit on both characteristics. In this setting we determine the conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a symmetric equilibrium. When capacity is unobservable there exists a continuum o...

This study aims to understand how buyer–seller relationship, competitive environment and guanxi affect Chinese manufacturers’ decision to implement Green Supply Chain Collaboration (GSCC). We also examine whether guanxi is able to mediate the buyer–seller relationship and GSCC implementation. Data collected from 222 Chinese manufacturing organizations were analyzed using the partial least squar...

We construct an agent-based model of the online electronics market, consisting of 10,000 buyers and 50 sellers. Buyers repeatedly interact with sellers, searching for high quality and low price, but only some buyers know seller quality prior to purchase. Buyers may learn seller quality directly or from information obtained from other buyers or else estimate quality through market share heuristi...

We study a dynamic buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The potential buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value to him is uncertain, but the seller cannot credibly convey its value to the buyer without disclosing the information itself. Information comes as divisible hard evidence. We show how and why the seller can appropriate a su...

We study how seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior on eBay are affected by an improvement in market transparency. The improvement was achieved by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings. It led to a significant increase in buyer satisfaction with seller performance, but not to an increase in seller exit. When sellers had the choice between exiting—a reduction in adverse selection—and im...

 Buyer-seller watermarking protocols are designed to deter clients from illegally distributing copies of digital content. To be efficient and fair is important to buyer-seller protocols. In this paper, an anonymous and interactive buyer-seller protocol is proposed, which is designed to be impartial and efficient. To solve the unbinding problem and the buyers’ right problem, operations of water...

A seller wishes to sell an object to one of multiple bidders. The valuations of the bidders are privately known. We consider the joint design problem in which the seller can decide the accuracy by which bidders learn their valuation and to whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal information structures in an optimal auction exhibit a number of properties: (i) information structures...

The rapid development of Internet and e-commerce technologies has led to the exponential growth of online markets in the past decade. Given that these markets are sustained by a community of buyers and sellers, an increasing number of studies have examined online buyer-seller exchange relationships. Whereas most of the existing research is focused on mechanisms to facilitate buyer-seller intera...

Online auctions provide a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of seller reputation on the price paid for a good. This paper examined 62 "matched " auctions and found that an auction seller with a "reputation advantage " over another seller received a price premium of 8.3% on average, when the sellers offered nearly identical products. This paper discusses the properties of a "reputatio...