We study the effects of reputation and competition in a stylized market for experience goods. If interaction is anonymous, such markets perform poorly: sellers are not trustworthy, and buyers do not trust sellers. If sellers are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency quadruples but is still at only a third of the first best. Adding more information by granting buyers access...

The literature on competing auctions offers a model where sellers compete for buyers by setting reserve prices. An outstanding conjecture (e.g., Peters and Severinov 1997) is that the sellers post prices close to their marginal costs when the market becomes large. This conjecture is confirmed in this paper: we show that if all sellers have zero costs, then the equilibrium reserve price converge...

Buyers are typically unaware of the full set of offers when making a purchase. This paper examines how international trade interacts with this problem of incomplete information. Sellers must communicate their offers through costly price posting, but cannot reach all buyers. Consequently, no market clearing price exists, and sellers randomize over an equilibrium price distribution. Letting selle...

The online auction market has been growing rapidly, but what are the significant effects on Taiwan? Based upon the 80/20 rule and the Long Tail, the paper started its observation by taking Yahoo Auction platform as a case study and found a negative co-variance existing between performance and the number of online sellers. A further analysis showed that these 20% sellers promoted more items of g...

Buyers always want to obtain goods at the lowest price. To do so, a buyer agent can have multiple concurrent negotiations with all the sellers. It is obvious that if the buyer obtains a good price from one of the sellers, the buyer should have more bargaining power in negotiating with other sellers. Then, other sellers should offer a lower price in order to make a deal. In this way, the concurr...

This paper proposes a new e-procurement model for a large number of buyers and sellers interacting via the Internet. The goal of e-procurement is to create a satisfactory match between buyers’ demand and sellers’ supply. From our real-world experience, we view e-procurement as a process of negotiation to increase the matching quality of two corresponding specifications: one for buyers’ demand a...

We study the problem of designing a new trading market for dynamic spectrum sharing when there are multiple sellers and multiple buyers. First, we study the interaction among homogeneous buyers of spectrum as a noncooperative game and show the existence of a symmetric mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium (SMSNE). Second, we assume that the sellers employ an optimal mechanism, called the generalized ...

Multi-sided platforms are increasingly common, which is no surprise given the winner-take-all dynamics in platform-based markets. That is, the platform with the biggest installed base of buyers and sellers can arguably sustain its competitive advantage because of positive indirect network effects. We reexamine this argument with an agent-based simulation model, where we allow for variety seekin...

This study investigates a crucial aspect of the reputation mechanism design in electronic markets – the ability of buyers and sellers to revoke or mutually withdraw negative feedback and ratings. Based on an analysis of recent changes in eBay’s feedback mechanism design, we find that the two-way reputation system enables certain sellers to behave opportunistically by revoking negative feedbacks...

Retaining your customers is important for E-sellers to survive in the intensified competitive e-marketplace. We approach this issue from the perspective of “continuance intention”, a behavior intention that describes the willingness of customers to continue transacting with sellers. Drawing upon the trust-commitment theory, as well as institution-based trust factors, we examine two types of tru...