I consider an independent private values auction environment with risk–neutral buyers and an either risk–neutral or risk–averse seller. My setting differs from standard settings in two respects. First, the seller does not know his reservation value at the time he designs the auction, and second, he cannot commit to selling after observing the outcome of the auction. For general distributions of...

A buyer-seller watermarking protocol deters dishonest buyers from illegally distributing bought content. This is 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. At the same time, an honest buyer is prevented from being falsely accused of illegal content distribution by the seller. Many protoc...

I analyze how a buyer optimally contracts with a seller who is privately informed about his information structure, i.e., his ability of acquiring private signals containing imperfect cost information. I demonstrate that the seller ranks information structures according to the order of their signal distributions in the sense of second order stochastic dominance. Optimal contracts offer sellers w...

a r t i c l e i n f o Motivated by the contradictory findings in literature regarding whether high-reputation sellers enjoy a price premium over low-reputation sellers, this paper examines the pricing strategies of sellers with different reputation levels. We find that a negative price premium effect (i.e., a high-reputation seller charges a lower price than a low-reputation seller) exists due ...

Consider a good (such as a hotel room) which, if not sold on time, is worth nothing to the seller. For a customer who is considering a choice of such goods, their prices may change dramatically by the time the customer needs to use the good; thus a customer who is aware of this fact might choose to gamble, delaying buying until the last moment in the hopes of better prices. While this gamble ca...

This paper revisits recent empirical research on buyer credulity in arts auctions and auctions for assets in general. We show that elementary results in auction theory can fully account for some stylized facts on asset returns that have been held to suggest that sellers of assets can exploit buyers by providing biased estimates of asset values. We argue that, rather than showing that buyers are...

We present a novel logic-based approach to automate multi-issue bilateral negotiation in e-marketplaces. In such frameworks issues to negotiate on can be multiple, interrelated, and may not be fixed in advance. We use logic to model relations among issues and to allow agents express their preferences on them. In particular, we introduce the logic P(N ), a fuzzy propositional logic extended with...

A working paper in the IN SEAD Working Paper Series is intended as a means whereby a fac ulty researcher's thoughts and findings ma y be communicated to interested readers. The paper should be considered preliminary in nature and may require revision. Printed a t INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France. Kindly do not reproduce or circulate without permission. We study the effect of anticipated regret on ...