Increasingly, buyers are turning to the use of online, reverse auctions in their negotiation activities with suppliers. How does the use of these price competition mechanisms impact buyer-supplier relationships? We consider this question in the context of a quasi-experiment involving six reverse auctions conducted in the supply base of a major industrial buyer. The results indicate that online,...

Recently fixed pricing and auctions have been brought together in a new pricing format that offers bidders the option of prematurely ending an auction at a fixed price. The growing popularity of auctions presents an interesting pricing decision for managers: whether to sell at a fixed price, in a regular auction, or through a buy-it-now auction. This paper studies eBay’s buy-it-now auction and ...

In the present study, the effects of bioethanolunleaded gasoline blends on engine performance were investigated in a spark ignition engine. Fuel containing 100% ethanol (E100), fuel blend containing 40% bioethanol by volume (E40) and 100% unleaded gasoline (E0) were tested and the test results were compared. As the result of the study, it was found that the use of unleaded gasoline and bioethan...

Our objective is to assess personal income under perfect competition, when factors are rewarded according to their productivities, and to contrast the ensuing distribution with the status quo. Competition will yield winners and losers, both in terms of factor claims and in terms of regions or provinces. Income differences will press people to migrate. To analyze this, we divide China into 30 in...

Until its sales of a product materialize, a firm is a “pre-producer” in the market for that product. That firm may may be a new start-up, or it may already sell other products. Firms that do not succeed in generating sales eventually become discouraged and move on to other activities. When this fate befalls a lot of firms, as it recently did in several IT-related businesses, the indistry experi...

It is well known that in linear programming, the optimal values of the dual variables can be interpreted as shadow prices (marginal values) of the right-hand-side coefficients. However, this is true only under nondegeneracy assumptions. Since real problems are often degenerate, the output from conventional LP software regarding such marginal information can be misleading. This paper surveys and...

AIMS To review empirical research that seeks to relate marginal increases in enforcement against the supply of illicit drugs to changes in drug prices at the level of the drug supply system being targeted. METHOD Review of empirical studies. FINDINGS Although the fact of prohibition itself raises prices far above those likely to pertain in legal markets, there is little evidence that raisin...

A shadow price is a process S̃ lying within the bid/ask prices S, S of a market with proportional transaction costs, such that maximizing expected utility from consumption in the frictionless market with price process S̃ leads to the same maximal utility as in the original market with transaction costs. For finite probability spaces, this note provides an elementary proof for the existence of suc...

Motivated by applications to bond markets, we propose a multivariate framework for discrete time financial markets with proportional transaction costs and a countable infinite number of tradable assets. We show that the no-arbitrage of second kind property (NA2 in short), introduced by [17] for finite dimensional markets, allows to provide a closure property for the set of attainable claims in ...

The dramatic increase in the price of rice and other commodities over the past year has generated new interest in how these markets work and how they can be improved. This paper uses an exceptionally rich data set to test the extent to which markets in Madagascar are integrated across space at different scales of analysis and to explain some of the factors that limit spatial arbitrage and price...