Michael Conrad earned his PhD at 2 November, 2009 with his work about mechanisms and protocols for secure legal relations in distributed and spontaneous electronic markets (Fig. 1). At the Institute of Telematics he mainly worked on the projects SESAM and KAI. Meanwhile he meets new challenges at its new employer IDS GmbH working on the development of smart grids. We wish Dr. Conrad all the best!

Abstract—In this contribution we transfer a customer purchase incidence model for consumer products which is based on Ehrenberg’s repeat-buying theory to Web-based information products. Ehrenberg’s repeat-buying theory successfully describes regularities on a large number of consumer product markets. We show that these regularities exist in electronic markets for information goods too, and that...

Electronic markets have a short but dynamic history. How an electronic market can be successfully developed remains in dispute. There is a clear need to better understand the nature of electronic markets themselves and, in particular, to review important developments in their conceptualisation. To enable a deeper understanding of these issues, we decided to restrict our investigation to electro...

W examine the impact of reduced search costs on prices of commodity products in electronic marketplaces. Conventionally, reduced consumer search costs may be expected to engender stronger price competition between firms, resulting in lower prices and improved consumer welfare. This notion was formalized in Stahl (1989, “Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search,” American Economic R...

Standardized product classification systems play a major role for searching and comparing offered products on electronic markets. Especially in case of large multivendor product catalogs classified data becomes an important asset and success factor. The most known systems are UNSPSC and eCl@ss, however they are still developing, and new systems are emerging as well. Classification systems diffe...

The financial industry is in midst of a fundamental transformation. Changes in customer behavior and the impact of information technology are believed to change the financial industry from hierarchical to market-based structures. Although electronic markets in the financial services industry are well known in B2B processes such as e.g. stock exchanges, only little research has been undertaken T...

Price dispersion, the variance in price for identical products across retailers, is a persistent feature of Internetbased markets, even those mediated by shopping agents (shopbots). In this paper, we propose a model for explaining this price dispersion based on limited consumer awareness of competing retailers and brand sensitivity, the willingness to pay a premium to buy from a leading retaile...

This paper focuses on the prominent issue of automating bargaining agents within electronic markets. Models of bargaining in literature deal with settings wherein there are only two agents and no model satisfactorily captures settings in which there is competition among buyers, being they more than one, and analogously among sellers. In this paper, we extend the principal bargaining protocol, i...

Extended Abstract Electronic exchanges have enhanced the viability of secondary markets including markets for used books. Online used book markets offer a wider selection, lower search costs, and significantly lower prices than do physical used bookstores. The increased viability of online used book markets has caused concern among groups such as the Book Publishers Association and Author's Gui...

The blossoming digital economy provides many golden opportunities for small businesses. However, two sets of issues have a significant impact on competition in electronic markets: one is the cost of technology infrastructure, the other is information asymmetry. These problems may lead to a market of natural monopolies with a few well-established brand names in the digital economy. Therefore, we...