We describe MARI (Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediary), a project being conducted in the Software Agents group at the MIT Media Lab, and the challenges and issues we are facing in its design and implementation. MARI is an intermediary architecture intended as a generalized platform for the specification and brokering of heterogeneous goods and services. The project reflects our vision of how ...

Michael Conrad earned his PhD at 2 November, 2009 with his work about mechanisms and protocols for secure legal relations in distributed and spontaneous electronic markets (Fig. 1). At the Institute of Telematics he mainly worked on the projects SESAM and KAI. Meanwhile he meets new challenges at its new employer IDS GmbH working on the development of smart grids. We wish Dr. Conrad all the best!

Abstract—In this contribution we transfer a customer purchase incidence model for consumer products which is based on Ehrenberg’s repeat-buying theory to Web-based information products. Ehrenberg’s repeat-buying theory successfully describes regularities on a large number of consumer product markets. We show that these regularities exist in electronic markets for information goods too, and that...

Electronic markets have a short but dynamic history. How an electronic market can be successfully developed remains in dispute. There is a clear need to better understand the nature of electronic markets themselves and, in particular, to review important developments in their conceptualisation. To enable a deeper understanding of these issues, we decided to restrict our investigation to electro...

W examine the impact of reduced search costs on prices of commodity products in electronic marketplaces. Conventionally, reduced consumer search costs may be expected to engender stronger price competition between firms, resulting in lower prices and improved consumer welfare. This notion was formalized in Stahl (1989, “Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search,” American Economic R...

Standardized product classification systems play a major role for searching and comparing offered products on electronic markets. Especially in case of large multivendor product catalogs classified data becomes an important asset and success factor. The most known systems are UNSPSC and eCl@ss, however they are still developing, and new systems are emerging as well. Classification systems diffe...

The financial industry is in midst of a fundamental transformation. Changes in customer behavior and the impact of information technology are believed to change the financial industry from hierarchical to market-based structures. Although electronic markets in the financial services industry are well known in B2B processes such as e.g. stock exchanges, only little research has been undertaken T...

Price dispersion, the variance in price for identical products across retailers, is a persistent feature of Internetbased markets, even those mediated by shopping agents (shopbots). In this paper, we propose a model for explaining this price dispersion based on limited consumer awareness of competing retailers and brand sensitivity, the willingness to pay a premium to buy from a leading retaile...

This paper focuses on the prominent issue of automating bargaining agents within electronic markets. Models of bargaining in literature deal with settings wherein there are only two agents and no model satisfactorily captures settings in which there is competition among buyers, being they more than one, and analogously among sellers. In this paper, we extend the principal bargaining protocol, i...

BACKGROUND Olive trees (Olea europaea subsp. europaea var. europaea) naturally grow in areas spanning the Mediterranean basin and towards the East, including the Middle East. In the Iranian plateau, the presence of olives has been documented since very ancient times, though the early history of the crop in this area is shrouded in uncertainty. METHODS The varieties presently cultivated in Ira...