Our objective is to determine if a first-price auction or a posted-price market provides a seller with the larger expected revenue when buyers have a common value for the item being sold. An agent-based, posted-price market and an agent-based, first-price common-value auction with a reserve price are developed to compare these selling methods. When the seller cannot impose a reserve price in th...

AbstrAct: Digital watermarking is an emerging technology for combating copyright piracy. In real applications, the transaction between a buyer and a seller is done through a specific watermarking protocol, which enables the seller to successfully identify a traitor from a pirated copy, while preventing the dishonest seller from framing an inno cent buyer. In this paper, we propose a new buyer-s...

Buyer-seller networks where price is determined by an ascending-bid auction are important in many economic examples such as certain real estate markets, radio spectrum sharing, and buyer-supplier networks. However, it may be that some sellers are better off not participating in the auction. We consider what happens if sellers can make a take it or leave it offer to one of their linked buyers be...

The buyer’s trust in seller in consumer to consumer e-commerce plays a critical role in consumer purchase decisions. Thus, this paper aims at analyzing the relationships between buyer’s trust in seller, price discount, and price premium by using product price as a moderator variable. A trust function for sellers was calculated through a questionnaire, by using the feedback mechanism and by appl...

A well functioning reputation and feedback system is foundational in consumer-to-consumer electronic commerce, an example of which is the electronic auction. Our interest in this paper is the analysis of the predictive power of both buyer and seller comments in determining the resolvability of transaction disputes in online auctions. Using data gathered from the eBay, Inc. reputation system, we...

We consider a revenue maximizing seller who, before proposing a mechanism to sell her object(s), observes a vector of signals correlated with buyers’ valuations. Each buyer knows only the signal that the seller observes about him but not the signals she observes about other buyers. The seller therefore has information about buyers’ valuations that is not common knowledge. How will the seller di...

This paper analyzes seller characteristics and choices in approximately 1000 eBay auctions for a particular model of PDA. Seller characteristics include frequency of selling, reputation, and the qualities of the product sold. Seller choices include the length of the auction, information provided about the product, starting price, and whether to use a ‘Buy it Now’ option. We find that different ...

A price-setting seller faces a buyer with unknown reservation value. We show that if the buyer is sufficiently risk averse, the seller can benefit from employing a Possibly-Final Offer (PFO) strategy. In a PFO, if the buyer rejects the seller’s initial offer the seller sometimes terminates the interaction. If the seller does not terminate, he follows up with a subsequent, more attractive offer....