Reputation models depend on the ratings provided by buyers to gauge the reliability of sellers in multi-agent based e-commerce environment. However, there is no prevention for the cases in which a buyer misjudges a seller, and provides a negative rating to an original satisfactory transaction. In this case, how should the seller get his reputation repaired and utility loss recovered? In this wo...

The recent emergence of internet-based electronic market places is changing the structure of traditional marketing channels in a fundamental way. Collaboration may increase because of lower transaction costs related with increased information availability. At the same time these same factors, through the effect they have on mutual dependency and uncertainty in the buyer-seller dyad, are conside...

In this study, a new warranty service strategy is proposed and analyzed. This strategy adds the renewing free-replacement warranty to a non-repairable product sold under the rebate warranty policy. According to the renewing free-replacement warranty, the seller (manufacturer) is responsible for replacing all failed product during the warranty period, and the warranty begins anew with each repla...

We examine a setting in which a buyer wishes to purchase probabilistic information from some agent. The seller must invest effort in order to gain access to the information, and must therefore be compensated appropriately. However, the information being sold is hard to verify and the seller may be tempted to lie in order to collect a higher payment. While it is generally easy to design informat...

— This research proposes a novel auction mechanism for transactive energy exchange between buyers and sellers, modeled as agents in a microgrid. The mechanism is implemented by a separate microgrid controller (MC) agent, and requires big data flow with the other agents through an iterative bidding process. Although private user information remains hidden to the MC, a theoretical analysis shows ...

We consider a price discrimination problem in which a seller has a single object for sale to a potential buyer. At the time of contracting, the buyer’s private type is his incomplete private information about his value, and the seller can disclose additional private information to the buyer. We study the question of whether discriminatory information disclosure can be profitable to the seller u...

This paper investigates the extent of the holdup underinvestment problem in a buyer-seller relationship in which the seller has private information about his alternative trading opportunities. Theory predicts that, compared with a situation in which outside options are publicly observed, the seller obtains an informational rent while the buyer bears an informational loss. As a result the seller...

We study the consequences for sellers from being perceived as unreliable. We use a theoretical model to generate predictions about how information about reliability impacts sellers, and show that the e↵ect depends on the search process that consumers endogenously follow: purchasing after finding information that qualifies a product, versus purchasing after not finding information that disqualif...