Fingerprinting schemes deter people from illegal copying of digital data by enabling the merchant of the data to identify the original buyer of a copy that was redistributed illegally. All known fingerprinting schemes are symmetric in the following sense: Both the buyer and the merchant know the fingerprinted copy. Thus, when the merchant finds this copy somewhere, there is no proof that it was...

We consider an American contingent claim on a financial market where the buyer has additional information. Both agents (seller and buyer) observe the same prices, while the information available to them may differ due to some extra exogenous knowledge the buyer has. The buyer’s information flow is modeled by an initial enlargement of the reference filtration. It seems natural to investigate the...

The starting point for this study was the obvious " mis-match " between the dominating, consumer marketing-oriented way of approaching customer satisfaction on the one hand and our current understanding of industrial buyer–seller relationships and networks on the other. The purpose of this paper is to present a relational and contextual perspective on customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction i...

It is often claimed that large buyers wield buyer power. Existing theories of this effect generally assume upstream monopoly. Yet the evidence is strongest with upstream competition. We show that upstream competition can yield buyer power for large buyers by generating supplier-level volume uncertainty—a feature that emerges from case study evidence of upstream competition—so the negotiated pri...

This article develops a supply chain coordination model with a single-vendor and a single-buyer. The vendor manufactures the product in lots and delivers to the buyer in equal shipments. However, the vendor’s production process is not perfectly reliable. During a production run, the process may shift from an in-control state to an out-ofcontrol state at any random time and produces some defecti...

and Introduction A result by Cremer and McLean in 1985 shows that ”if buyers’ valuations are sufficiently correlated, there exists a mechanism that allows the seller to extract the full surplus from efficient allocation as revenue”. This paper uses automated mechanism design to examine the sensitivity of the Cremer-McLean result when its main technical assumption is relaxed. The Cremer-McLean r...

Priced oblivious transfer (POT) is a two-party protocol between a vendor and a buyer in which the buyer purchases digital goods without the vendor learning what is bought. Although privacy properties are guaranteed, current schemes do not offer fair exchange. A malicious vendor can, e.g., prevent the buyer from retrieving the goods after receiving the payment, and a malicious buyer can also acc...

Although Advance Selling and Probabilistic Selling differ in both motivation and implementation, we argue that they share a common characteristic—both offer consumers a choice involving buyer uncertainty. We develop a formal model to examine the general economics of purchase options that involve buyer uncertainty, explore the differences in buyer uncertainty created via these two strategies, an...

Bandwidth gains achieved in telecommunication technology have been followed by a recent proliferation of Intelligent Agents on the internet. Intelligent agents have emerged as mechanisms that aid both buyers and sellers in very different ways. It has been observed by several researchers that electronic search mechanisms promote "frictionless" competitive markets that lower buyers' search costs ...

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....