We challenge the view that the presence of powerful buyers stifles suppliers’ incentives to innovate. Following Katz (1987), we model countervailing (or buyer) power as the ability of, in particular, large buyers to substitute away from a given supplier. We employ a bargaining framework and find that the presence of larger and more powerful buyers increases a supplier’s incentives to reduce mar...

This paper is about business modelling and negotiation protocol design in distributed scheduling, where individual agents have individual (potentially conflicting) interests. It is motivated by BT’s workforce scheduling problem, in which multiple service providers have to serve multiple service buyers. The service providers and buyers all attempt to maximize their own utility. The overall probl...

This paper considers platform competition in a two-sided market that includes buyers and sellers. One of the platforms benefits from a partial belief advantage, in that each side believes that it is more likely that the other side will join the advantaged platform. We find that the degree of the platform’s belief advantage affects its decision regarding the business model (i.e., whether to subs...

Both oligopoly theory and experiments are concerned almost uniquely with sellers’ behavior. Buyers’ ability to exhibit non-trivial behavior in different market institutions remains unaddressed. This paper investigates the impact of three variables (number of buyers, surplus division at the market-clearing price and information revelation) on strategic and fairness-motivated demand withholding. ...

In this article, we analyze the application of options contract in the special commodity supply chain such as fresh agricultural products. This problem is discussed from the point of the retailer. When spot market and future market are both available, we discuss how the retailer chooses the optimal production. Furthermore, overconfidence is introduced to the supply chain of the fresh agricultur...

Lamport’s Happened-before relation is fundamental to coordinating actions in asynchronous systems. Its role is less dominant in synchronous systems, in which bounds are available on transmission times over channels. This paper initiates a study of the role that time bounds play in synchronous systems by focusing on two classes of problems: Ordered Response, in which a triggering event must be f...

INTRODUCTION The chemical industry is a much safer place to work than many industries with fewer inherent hazards. Nevertheless, almost all the accidents that have occurred need not have occurred. Most of them have happened before and have been described in published reports. Someone knew how to prevent them even if the people on the job at the time did not. There is something seriously wrong w...