Executive Summary • Issuers and states faced considerable challenges in 2018 due to federal policy changes and uncertainty, including reduced carrier participation and the need to make premium work-arounds to address the removal of direct federal funding for the cost-sharing reduction (“CSR”) program. For those receiving subsidies, their premium cost fell on average 3 percent in federally facil...

Feedback scores in an online marketplace have risen sharply over time, leading to substantial top-censoring. Some of the increase is explained by more satisfied raters, but at least 35-45% is attributable to raters applying lower standards. We show that this “reputation inflation” is the equilibrium outcome of a model in which (a) inferences made by future trading partners determine what consti...

The Web has becomes the means for enterprises to deliever electronic services to businesses and customers, and for service providers to discover services and build complex applications by using existing services. The number of the e-services is growing rapidly. This has raised the opportunity for e-service oriented marketplaces to provide the facilities for developing value-added services by co...

This article explores the development of sales tax on e-business. It points out that the problem was rooted in the fact that the seller is required to collect and remit the tax to the buyer’s state government. If the seller and the buyer do not reside in the same state, the buyer’s state government has no jurisdiction over the seller, unless there is a “physical presence” of the seller in the b...

The preservation of epidemiological information is challenging in several aspects, since this is both a data-intensive and multidisciplinary subject, with large amounts of data spanning several domains of knowledge. We present, as a case study, the Epidemic Marketplace (EM), a platform dedicated to the preservation of epidemiological resources. To ensure integrity of the data, the EM uses a met...

Currently, the major marketing channel for flower suppliers and retailers in Taiwan is the flower wholesale market. However, when the retailers make purchases in the wholesale market, the dominant suppliers offer poor service, and the retailers find it inconvenient to collect information on the price of flowers. Our study shows that the E-Commerce mechanism of the e-marketplace can improve trad...

The two leading online consumer-to-consumer platforms use very different revenue models: eBay.com in the United States uses a brokerage model in which sellers pay eBay on a transaction basis, whereas Taobao.com in China uses an advertising model in which sellers can use the basic platform service for free and pay Taobao for advertising services to increase their exposure. This paper studies how...

Business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces are Internet-based inter-organizational trading platforms that facilitate and foster the exchange of information, products and services, and other business transactions among many buyers and sellers. Despite the proliferation of B2B e-marketplaces, many B2B e-marketplaces have failed. A well-developed framework or standard for evaluating B2B emarketplac...

This paper analyses whether and how B2B e-commerce applications might increase access to the global economy for firms in developing and transitional economies. E-marketplaces are considered according to two variables: the extent to which access to the marketplaces are open or restricted, and the extent to which the marketplace is focused on online transactions or provision of information. The p...

This paper addresses the development of mechanisms for the creation of OSSD exchanges that could be used by developers across any geographical range, as long as all the developers can interact via some open network infrastructure such as the Internet. The structure of these exchanges can range from public repositories such as Sourceforge.net to intra-organizational forums for software developme...