Reputation systems aim to induce honest behavior in online trade by providing information about past conduct of users. Online reputation, however, is not directly connected to a person, but only to the virtual identity of that person. Users can therefore shed a negative reputation by creating a new account. We study the effects of such identity changes on the efficiency of reputation systems. W...

In 1994, James Sellers conjectured an infinite family of Ramanujan type congruences for 2-colored Frobenius partitions introduced by George E. Andrews. These congruences arise modulo powers of 5. In 2002 Dennis Eichhorn and Sellers were able to settle the conjecture for powers up to 4. In this article, we prove Sellers' conjecture for all powers of 5. In addition, we discuss why the Andrews-Sel...

We examine a platform owner’s optimal two-sided pricing strategy while considering seller-side innovation decisions and price competition. We model the innovation race among sellers in both finite and infinite horizons. In the finite case, we analytically show that the platform’s optimal seller-side access fee fully extracts the sellers’ surplus, and that the optimal buyer-side access fee mitig...

Virtual markets are becoming more and more accepted by buyers and sellers. The success of eBay has prompted other companies to offer auction sites to lure buyers and sellers. The new companies usually offer lower rates to attract virtual sellers thereby multiplying the number of options for virtual buyers. This project presents an exploratory study of the final value available to sellers on two...

LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 61, No. 4, 2013 (“The Impact of Gaming on Libraries,” edited by Scott Nicholson), pp. 825–835. © 2013 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Abstract Three school library staff members explore how they have used tabletop games in different school library settings. Teresa Copeland (Tesseract School, Paradise Valley, Arizona, USA) explores how tabletop and role-playing...

This report details work conducted as part of Nuffield Foundation grant EDU/42169 (Principal Investigator: Jake Anders). Parts of the work under this grant were carried out in collaboration with Morag Henderson, Alice Sullivan and Vanessa Moulton, working on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. In particular, the analysis reported in Section 4 was led by Morag Henderson....

This paper describes how introducing statistical dependency among trader values changes the equilibrium bidding strategies in bilateral k-double auctions and uses the special case of affiliation to illustrate the range of equilibrium responses to a change in the value distribution. Consistent with standard intuition, a change from independent to strictly affiliated valuations can result in high...

We present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of group identity – one’s perceived membership in social groups – on market transactions in an oligopoly market with a few sellers and buyers. We artificially induce group identity using art preferences and college majors in different treatments, respectively. Subjects are randomly assigned into the roles of buyers and sellers and int...

We explore the management of information and the response of market prices to such information. Sellers may be uncertain of dividends. We examine whether sellers anticipate buyers’ pricing behavior and whether buyers’ prices reflect correct inferences of the disclosure strategy of sellers. Buyers’ inferences and sellers’ anticipation require implicit Bayesian updating in solving for the equilib...

Despite the popularity of online auctions as a new e-commerce operating model, few studies have explored why sellers intend to pay for the services of particular auction sites, especially while other free auction services exist. Developed on the basis of the theory of perceived value, this study includes network externalities in seller perceptions and explores why sellers intend to pay for thes...