We introduce Weakest Link Games (WLGs), a cooperative game modeling domains where a team’s value is determined by its weakest member. The game is represented as an edgeweighted graph with designated source and target vertices, where agents are the edges. The quality of a path between the source vertex and target vertex is the minimal edge weight along the path; the value of a coalition of edges...

Business incubators and venture capital are effective instruments for supporting the development of new firms. The purpose of this paper is to explore cooperation mechanisms between business incubators and venture capitalists and find the equilibriums of the mechanisms. Also, this paper puts forward three mechanisms, revenue sharing mechanism, cost sharing mechanism and knowledge sharing mechan...

We consider a supply chain involving one supplier and one retailer in which a revenuesharing contract is adopted. Under this contract, the retailer can obtain the product from the supplier at a discounted price. As a compensation, the retailer must share his revenue with the supplier at a certain revenue-sharing rate, say r (0 ≤ r ≤ 1), where r represents the portion of the revenue to be kept b...

Industries are one of the main sources of pollution in the world. Besides, the levels of energy resources consumption including water, electricity, and fossil fuel are very different among industries. On the other hand, Iranian government pays a large amount of energy subsidy to manufacturing units. Because of it, the government wants to know which of manufacturing industries are efficient, pro...

The effects of sex control and twinning techniques on determination of optimal culling parity of cows in beef cow-calf production systems were deterministically analyzed using a herd model simulation. The model simulated the annualized net revenue as an economic indicator during the whole life cycle of a cow. Biological factors (survivability, growth, reproduction, and feed requirements) and ec...

This paper studies efficient and optimal auction design where bidders do not know their values and solicit advice from informed but biased advisors via a cheap-talk game. When advisors are biased toward overbidding, we characterize efficient equilibria of static auctions and equilibria of the English auction under the NITS condition (Chen, Kartik and Sobel (2008)). In static auctions, advisors ...

We study the problem of revenue maximization in the marketing model for social networks introduced by (Hartline, Mirrokni, Sundararajan, WWW ’08). In this setting, a digital product is sold to a set of potential buyers under positive externalities, and the seller seeks for a marketing strategy, namely an ordering in which he approaches the buyers and the prices offered to them, that maximizes h...

A large body of theoretical work has explored the channels through which vertical contracts can induce efficiency improvements. However, it is also important to study vertical contracts empirically in order to gain insight into the relative size of different types of efficiency gains. In this paper, I empirically analyse a contractual innovation in the vertically separated video rental industry...

Abstract Reverse pricing is a market mechanism under which a consumer’s bid for a product leads to a sale if the bid exceeds a hidden acceptance threshold the seller has set in advance. The seller faces two key decisions in designing such a mechanism: First, he must decide where in the process to collect the revenue—that is, whether to commit to a minimum markup above cost (and thus define the ...