The rise of E-commerce came with the promise of disintermediation. However, the e-commerce scenario today is flooded by an increasing number of intermediaries, e.g. Amazon, Verisign and Thawte. Economics of intermediation suggests that intermediaries arise when consumers are unsure of the market in general. The question then is: what market conditions prompt such consumer perceptions of uncerta...

This paper presents a framework, which helps to relate the choice of a basic design for deposit insurance to the special economic and institutional environments of a country. Based on new empirical evidence, the study extends the recent academic effort on optimal DIS designing and suggests that, though limited in number, there are economies whose development stage makes them especially prone to...

Market design is becoming a very important research topic in the context of the electronic economy. Two factors explain this trend: (1) the creation of new markets to facilitate deregulation (telecommunication frequencies, electric power, etc.) and (2) the emergence of strategic analysis and of experimental economics. E-commerce tools will contribute to the emergence of more structured marketpl...

Nicholas Barbon’s A discourse of trade presents, in its construction, substance, and rhetoric, an early outline of a new science of the legislator for the new politics of commerce. Barbon drew together economic and political arguments, applying insights from the latter to a new understanding of the political potential of the former. His accounts of the aspect of infinity in economic growth, his...

Automated negotiation agents negoatite issues of an e-commerce transaction with human consumers on behalf of e-commerce vendors, and they can increase the financial benefits of the consumer and the vendor jointly. Both the artificial intelligence community and the economics (game-theory) community have proposed methods for negotiation agent design. The focus has been on agents that are restrict...

ERIC K. CLEMONS is Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a pioneer in the systematic study of the transformational impacts of information on the strategy and practice of business. His research and teaching interests include strategic uses of information systems such as e-Commerce, information economics, the change...

The purpose of the paper is to discuss ten things potential users should know about the limits of the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) representation for estimating and forecasting time-varying conditional correlations. The reasons given for caution about the use of DCC include the following: DCC represents the dynamic conditional covariances of the standardized residuals, and hence does n...