One of the most important decisions that a firm faces in managing its supply chainis a procurement decision: selecting suitable suppliers among many potential compet-ing sellers and reducing the purchase cost. While both auction and bargaining havebeen extensively studied in the literature, the research that combines both auction andbargaining is limited. In this paper, we consi...

This paper presents a case study of Malaysia’s e-procurement initiative. This initiative is locally known as e-Perolehan. The case reports among others, the vision of the Malaysian government in the light of embarking on e-procurement, the process flow within e-Perolehan, and the issues therein. The general consensus amongst both the buyer and seller communities is that e-procurement will becom...

Digital watermarks have previously been proposed for the purposes of copy protection and copy deterrence for multimedia content. In copy deterrence, a content owner (seller) inserts a unique watermark into a copy of the content before it is sold to a buyer. If the buyer sells unauthorized copies of the watermarked content, then these copies can be traced to the unlawful reseller (original buyer...

Bunker fuel constitutes about three quarters of the operational costs for liners. A strong effort is justified to define operational conditions and management strategies to minimize fuel-related costs, especially if the variability of fuel price is considered. Fuel sellers and liners use contracts to be guaranteed a refuelling quantity and control bunker price. We propose a game theory based ap...

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...

Numerous contract scenarios in information technology goods and services, telecommunications, digital entertainment, and supply chain contracting feature demand uncertainty for individual customers (demand is subject to idiosyncratic demand shocks that change marginal valuations). Sellers in these scenarios often use non-linear pricing mechanisms (flat rate, two part tariffs, three-part tariffs...

Buyer-seller watermarking are protocols guaranteeing the buyer prevents false infringement accusations and the seller protects the watermark secrets from the buyer. Most recently, Chang et al. proposed an efficient and fair buyer-seller watermarking scheme for large scale networks quite recently. In this correspondence, we first shows its three weaknesses: the buyer can easily remove the waterm...

A new theory of coexistence of money and higher-return assets is set out. It applies to any setting in which some trade involves an exchange of goods for assets and occurs between two people–a buyer and a seller. We show that there exists a function mapping the portfolios of the buyer and the seller to the trade that occurs such that (i) the trade is in the buyer-seller core and (ii) some peopl...

A trusted third party (TTP) is introduced to the buyer-seller protocol to guarantee the transaction fairness in protocol. However, the TTP practically increases the cost in the buyer-seller protocol. To address this issue, we propose a novel buyer–seller watermarking protocol to eliminate the need for a TTP. By dividing the buyer’s secret key into two primary mechanisms: the buyer’s watermark, ...