Several authors have argued that because modern computing and communications technologies reduce buyer search costs and other market inefficiencies, there should be intense price competition between sellers in electronic markets. This paper examines this prediction using data on the airline ticket offerings of online travel agents (OTA). We find that different OTAs offer tickets with substantia...

Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in the United States have been mainly underwritten and sold using the bookbuilding method; a method inherently riddled with inefficiencies and information asymmetries. Consequently, IPOs in the U.S. (and other countries for that matter) have been persistently underpriced, at the expense of both the issuing firm and public investors. Alternative underwriting proce...

This paper focuses on the derivation of taxation mechanisms for improving system-level behavior in congestion games with unknown price-sensitive users. Here, a taxation mechanism represents a general rule for assigning local taxation functions to edges in a given network, e.g., Pigovian taxes or marginal-cost taxes. Recent results have identified taxation mechanisms that lead to optimal system-...

On many online auction sites it is now possible for a seller to augment his auction with a maximum or buy-out price. The use of this instrument has been justified in “one-shot” auctions by appeal to impatience or risk aversion. Here we offer additional justification by observing that trading on internet auctions is not of a “one-shot” nature, but that market participants expect more transaction...

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented what he called his “electrical speech machine,” modernly known as the telephone [2]. For several years after its invention, the telephone was known only to be nothing more than a laboratory experiment. Shortly after the turn of the century, however, came the advent of circuit switched networks, allowing for the efficient global deployment of telephones. T...