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...

Extended Abstract Electronic exchanges have enhanced the viability of secondary markets including markets for used books. Online used book markets offer a wider selection, lower search costs, and significantly lower prices than do physical used bookstores. The increased viability of online used book markets has caused concern among groups such as the Book Publishers Association and Author's Gui...

The blossoming digital economy provides many golden opportunities for small businesses. However, two sets of issues have a significant impact on competition in electronic markets: one is the cost of technology infrastructure, the other is information asymmetry. These problems may lead to a market of natural monopolies with a few well-established brand names in the digital economy. Therefore, we...

1. Overview and Summary The term price dispersion is commonly used to refer to firms in the same market selling identical goods for different prices at the same time. Since the early conjecture by Bakos (1997) that electronic markets are likely to feature lower price dispersion on account of lower search costs, a number of researchers have studied how information technology alters the observed ...

This research attempts to develop a conceptual foundation for authentication in electronic markets by drawing upon the well-known principal-agent theory in Economics. First, principal-agent theory is discussed and related to authentication in electronic markets. Then, the technologies and business functionalities that are currently available to support authentication in electronic markets are e...

The paper proposes a new perspective on value creation in the information age. At first there will be a brief analysis of the current developments in the field of Electronic Markets and Electronic Commerce. Then the fundamental shifts in value creation will be illustrated using the financial industry sector. At the end a new framework for Business Media will be introduced.

This article presents an economic model of a monopoly retailer with supply and demand uncertainties that enables the study of incentives for B2B e-procurement technology investments that permit inventory coordination and operating cost control. In this context, we focus on the information technology (IT) adoption behavior of firms, emphasizing the trade-offs they make between managing supply pr...

Trust is particularly important in online markets to facilitate the transfer of sensitive consumer information to online retailers. In electronic markets, various proposals have been made to facilitate these information transfers. We develop analytic models of hidden information to analyze the effectiveness of these regimes to build trust and their efficiency in terms of social welfare. We find...

Cloud computing is a new and increasingly popular form of IT outsourcing. It implies that a cloud service provider offers very standardized abstract IT services which are accessed by a user over the Internet. While cloud services are supposed to be very beneficial for small and medium-sized enterprises, the adoption of such services has been low in this group, among other reasons because of hig...