A price-setting seller faces a buyer with unknown reservation value. We show that if the buyer is sufficiently risk averse, the seller can benefit from employing a Possibly-Final Offer (PFO) strategy. In a PFO, if the buyer rejects the seller’s initial offer the seller sometimes terminates the interaction. If the seller does not terminate, he follows up with a subsequent, more attractive offer....

In auctions where a seller can post a reserve price but if the object fails to sell cannot commit never to attempt to resell it, revenue equivalence between repeated first price and second price auctions without commitment results. When the time between auctions goes to zero, seller expected revenues converge to those of a static auction with no reserve price. With many bidders, the seller equi...

T paper studies the role of product availability in attracting consumer demand. We start with a newsvendor model, but additionally assume that stockouts are costly to consumers. The seller sets an observable price and an unobservable stocking quantity. Consumers anticipate the likelihood of stockouts and determine whether to visit the seller. We characterize the rational expectations equilibriu...

We develop a model of separating equilibrium where a monopolist markets a physical product to two types of consumers in the online channel. We show how the seller may use personalization technology to limit or even eliminate the distortion caused by the cannibalization problem. This results in higher product quality levels and earlier product introductions for goods aimed at low type consumers....

Multi agent system (MAS) model has been extensively used in the different tasks of E-Commerce such as customer relation management (CRM), negotiation and brokering. The objective of this paper is to evaluate a seller agent’s various cognitive parameters like capability, trust, and desire. After selecting a best seller agent from ordering queue, it applies negotiation strategies to find the most...

I analyze a search equilibrium in a large market where customer relationship based on past trade arises endogenously together with service priority and sales. Specifically, there exists a unique equilibrium where it is optimal for a buyer to make repeat purchases from the related seller and optimal for a seller to give service priority to the related buyer. Customer relationship always improves...

A trusted third party (TTP) is introduced to the buyer-seller protocol to guarantee the transaction fairness in protocol. However, the TTP practically increases the cost in the buyer-seller protocol. To address this issue, we propose a novel buyer–seller watermarking protocol to eliminate the need for a TTP. By dividing the buyer’s secret key into two primary mechanisms: the buyer’s watermark, ...

This paper explores a game where sellers of products sell the information concerning what price is charged for their products to an agent trying to find the minimum price in the market. Each seller draws a product price from a different distribution, known to the agent. Sellers know both their competitors’ distributions and the actual competitors’ price. In equilibrium the lowest product price ...

Partial resale refers to the business scenario where some resale activities, yet not all, are feasible. A paper by Geng, Wu and Whinston[12] finds that a time-restricted resale market may benefit a ticket seller more than both unrestricted resale and no resale. This paper extends the study on profitable partial resale model in two directions with both theoretical and practical importance. First...

A buyer-seller protocol for content rights protection deters dishonest buyers from illegally distributing bought content. This can be achieved by giving the seller the capability to trace and identify these buyers, while also allowing the seller to prove illegal acts to a third party. Many protocols have been proposed, one of the most recent being the protocol of Ahmed et al. in the EURASIP Jou...