Trade fairs play an important role in marketing. In many cases, exhibitors view trade fairs as an opportunity for transactional selling, and thus may overlook opportunities that exist for initiating and building relationships with key accounts. This paper maps exhibitors’ and visitors’ exhibition objectives against key account management (KAM) activities, and in particular examines the role tra...

This paper describes the activities performed to define the user requirements of a system named FAIRWIS (Trade Fairs Web-based Information Services), project which is being promoted by the European Commission under the IST program. Detailed analysis of users involved in the business of trade fairs, the environment in which they operate and the tasks they perform have been carried out. The study...

Article history: Received 23 September 2011 Available online 22 December 2011 The medieval Champagne fairs are widely used to draw lessons about the institutional basis for long-distance impersonal exchange. This paper re-examines the causes of the outstanding success of the Champagne fairs in mediating international trade, the timing and causes of the fairs' decline, and the institutions for s...

This paper puts forward an explanation for the origin and existence of banks based on the role of information in trade. We consider an economy populated by publicly “visible” institutions, that is institutions whose actions are observable by every agent in the economy. As long as the extent of trade is limited, these institutions can act as “fairs” and sustain trade by recording and disseminati...

The EU funded FAIRWIS project (Trade Fair Web-based Information Services) aims at offering on-line innovative services to support the management of trade fairs, either real or Web-based virtual fairs. One of the main differences with respect to what is currently available on Web sites is that these sites have static data that it is difficult to update and to put on-line in an appropriate format...