This research is designed to study consumers’ purchasing attitudes to counterfeit luxury goods on electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces). And two research hypotheses are proposed in this research. Based on data analysis of 243 samples, this study explores the dimensions of consumer attitudes (morality and law, accessibility, burden-bearing, function effectiveness, economical efficiency) and m...

We study the problem of fairly dividing a set of goods amongst a group of agents, when those agents have preferences that are ordinal relations over alternative bundles of goods (rather than utility functions) and when our knowledge of those preferences is incomplete. The incompleteness of the preferences stems from the fact that each agent reports their preferences by means of an expression of...

The free-rider phenomenon which impedes the marketing of information goods is conventionally countered by copyright protection regulations and technology. Alternative ways to market information goods, in particular through systems based on the super-distribution of a good from buyer to buyer, have recently raised some interest. Some of them mimic peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, while advanc...

Through the integrated framework of participation theory and political economy, this article analyzes participatory opportunities in the virtual world Habbo Hotel, and how participation is constrained and framed by the producer’s commercial strategies, which are based on advertising and sales of virtual goods. The study also looks into the ways in which the producer Sulake Corporation discursiv...

Virtual consumption, or consumption of virtual goods and property, has become a major economic activity in social virtual worlds such as Second Life. Given that virtual consumption has become an important part of everyday virtual life in social virtual worlds, understanding virtual consumption can be an essential aspect to understanding user behavior in those worlds. Despite its significance, l...

This paper considers a world of two symmetric countries with two factors and two sectors. Outputs of the two sectors are imperfect substitutes and sectors differ in relative factor intensity. Each sector contains a continuum of heterogenous firms that produce differentiated goods within their sector. Trade is costly and there are both variable and fixed costs of exporting. The paper shows that ...

There is a tension between libertarians’ optimism about private supply of public goods and skepticism of the viability of voluntary collusion (Cowen 1992, Cowen and Sutter 1999). Playing off this asymmetry, Cowen (1992) advances the novel argument that the “free market in defense services” favored by anarcho-capitalists is a network industry where collusion is especially feasible. The current a...

It is often necessary to divide a resource among a number of agents, and to do so in a way that does not leave any of the agents feeling cheated. There are a number of published methods for dealing with the problem of fairly dividing goods. Many of these methods are very successful, capable of finding allocations that satisfy the participating agents and distribute the goods being disputed in a...