In this paper, we suggest using an English Auction Protocol for a procurement multi-attribute auction in which the item for sale is defined by several attributes, the buyer agent is the auctioneer, and the seller agents are the bidders. Such domains include auctions on task allocation, services, or compound products. At the beginning of the auction the buyer agent announces the required propert...

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....

Voluntary Exchange. If an airline mechanic gets paid $30,000 a year, it must be that the mechanic would rather have the money than the leisure time, while the airline would rather have the mechanic than have the money. Another example: apartment rentals. That is, price is bounded below by what the seller will accept: the supply price, and bounded above by what the buyer is willing to pay: the d...

A buyer facing two spatially-separated sellers can negotiate with only one potential seller at a time. However, with some delay, the buyer can move back and forth between the two sellers. The introduction of behavioral types, even with low probabilities, makes the equilibrium of the resulting multilateral bargaining problem essentially unique. The equilibrium has a war of attrition structure. T...

We consider a price discrimination problem in which a seller has a single object for sale to a potential buyer. At the time of contracting, the buyer’s private type is his incomplete private information about his value, and the seller can disclose additional private information to the buyer. We study the question of whether discriminatory information disclosure can be profitable to the seller u...

I analyze how a buyer optimally contracts with a seller who is privately informed about his information structure, i.e., his ability of acquiring private signals containing imperfect cost information. I demonstrate that the seller ranks information structures according to the order of their signal distributions in the sense of second order stochastic dominance. Optimal contracts offer sellers w...

We analyze the security of a fingerprinting scheme proposed at IWDW 2005. We show two results, namely that this scheme (1) does not provide seller security : a dishonest buyer can repudiate the fact that he redistributed a content, and (2) does not provide buyer security : a buyer can be framed by a malicious seller.

Supply chain management represents a critical competency in today’s global business environment, but neither commerce through EDI technology nor current Web applications satisfy combined requirements of process integration and flexibility. The present research builds on prior agent work to argue multi-agent systems offer tremendous potential and capability to overcome such limitations. The pape...

Digital watermarking protocols are the one, which have combined fingerprinting technique with watermarking, for embedding digital signal or watermark into an original multimedia object. Buyer-seller watermarking protocol is fundamentally applied to continue the digital rights of both buyers and seller. We proposed an identity-based buyer-seller watermarking protocol that encounters various weak...