"Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks" blared the headline in the New York Times above an article on the Pentagon's "policy analysis market" (PAM) project. The Pentagon intended to employ a "virtual stock market" — for the aggregation of information and derivation of forecasts — to help predict foreign-policy events such as a coup d'état in a particular country or terrorist atta...

Virtual markets are becoming more and more accepted by buyers and sellers. The success of eBay has prompted other companies to offer auction sites to lure buyers and sellers. The new companies usually offer lower rates to attract virtual sellers thereby multiplying the number of options for virtual buyers. This project presents an exploratory study of the final value available to sellers on two...

We empirically examine the trade-off between the benefits of buying online and the benefits of buying in a local retail store. How does a consumer’s physical location shape the relative benefits of buying from the online world? We explore this problem using data from Amazon on the top selling books for 1497 unique locations in the US for 10 months ending in January 2006. In particular, we exami...

The Continuous Double Auction (CDA) is the dominant market institution for real-world trading of equities, commodities, derivatives, etc. We describe a series of laboratory experiments that, for the first time, allow human subjects to interact with software bidding agents in a CDA. Our bidding agents use strategies based on extensions of the Gjerstad-Dickhaut and Zero-Intelligence-Plus algorith...

In this paper we report an extensive analysis of the different business models for auctions found on the Web. Three hundred websites randomly selected from the main search engines are analyzed, classified, commented and compared in terms of their basic parameters. Departing from a theoretical review of the classical auction theory applied to the online world, twelve business models are defined ...

a College of Business & Economics, Lehigh University b College of Business, College of William and Mary c Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland ABSTRACT Prior literature has documented the performance benefits from the use of electronic data interchange (EDI) and the Internet. Little research, however, has provided a direct comparison between the performance of the two syst...

The application of Internet-based virtual stock markets (VSMs) is an additional approach that can be used to predict shortand medium-term market developments. The basic concept involves bringing a group of participants together via the Internet and allowing them to trade shares of virtual stocks. These stocks represent a bet on the outcome of future market situations, and their value depends on...

BACKGROUND The Internet and telecommunications technologies contribute to national health care system infrastructures and extend global health care services markets. The Cuban national health care system offers a model to show how a national information portal can contribute to system integration, including research, education, and service delivery as well as international trade in products and...