With the explosive growth of internet activity, there will be an increasing reliance on intelligent software agents for electronic commerce and information retrieval. Such multi-agents systems will be comprised of self-motivated agents that interact with each other though negotiation and task delegation. Multi-agent technology models and facilitates these interactions through automated contract...

The aim of this article is to propose a solution to the principal-agent problem arising in construction contracts. The inability to write complete and enforceable contracts gives the contractor the opportunity to earn by cheating. The ultimate method to deal with this problem is to design a contractual mechanism that would stop a self-interested contractor from taking benefit resulting from any...

Prediction markets, in which contract prices are used to forecast future events, are increasingly applied to various domains ranging from political contests to scientific breakthroughs. However, the dynamics of such markets are not well understood. Here, we study the return dynamics of the oldest, most data-rich prediction markets, the Iowa Electronic Presidential Election "winner-takes-all" ma...

We examine a model of dynamic screening and price discrimination in which the seller has limited commitment power. Two cohorts of anonymous, patient, and riskneutral buyers arrive over two periods. Buyers in the first cohort arrive in period one privately informed about the distribution of their values, and then privately learn the value realizations in period two. Buyers in the second cohort a...

How do consumers choose from a menu of contracts? We analyze a novel dataset from three U.S. health clubs with information on both the contractual choice and the day-to-day attendance decisions of 7,752 members over three years. The observed consumer behavior is difficult to reconcile with standard preferences and beliefs. First, members who choose a contract with a flat monthly fee of over $70...

Under the e-commerce environment, network direct selling mode is developing rapidly, which an important way for enterprises to reduce logistics costs and storage risks win survival development. In this paper, order dual reserve decision model constructed based on option contract under mode. losses caused by uncertain demand, we investigate manufacturer’s optimal purchase decisions of spot optio...

Advertisement (ad) options have been recently studied as a novel guaranteed delivery (GD) system in online advertising. In essence, an ad option is a contract that gives an advertiser a right but not obligation to enter into transactions to purchase ad inventories such as page views or link clicks from a specific slot at one or multiple pre-specified prices in a specific future period. Compared...

In this article we give a review of regression-based Monte Carlo methods for pricing American options. The methods require in a first step that the generally in continuous time formulated pricing problem is approximated by a problem in discrete time, i.e., the number of exercising times of the considered option is assumed to be finite. Then the problem can be formulated as an optimal stopping p...