BACKGROUND Many markets have traditionally been dominated by a few best-selling products, and this is also the case for the health care industry. However, we do not know whether the market will be more or less concentrated when health care services are delivered online (known as E-consultation), nor do we know how to reduce the concentration of the E-consultation market. OBJECTIVE The aim of ...

The POPCORN project provides an infrastructure for globally distributed computation over the whole Internet. It provides any programmer connected to the Internet with a single huge virtual parallel computer composed of all processors on the Internet, which care to participate at any given moment. POPCORN provides a marketbased mechanism for trade in CPU time to motivate processors to provide th...

This paper examines the causes on market concentration in advertisingsupported online markets such as sports, news, and email. In particular, it is the first paper to explore the relationship between concentration and product differentiation, economies of scale, market size, advertising, content costs, and multi-market ownership in online markets. As expected, differentiated large markets with ...

Over the last decade, China’s online marketplaces have experienced rapid evolution. The first, EachNet, was established in 1999. EachNet was acquired in 2002 by eBay and renamed “eBay China.” The second, TaoBao, owned by Alibaba, China’s largest business-to-business portal, went online in April 2003. TaoBao replaced eBay China as market leader in 2004. eBay China was eventually sold to TOM Onli...

The study of mechanisms for multi-sided markets has received an increasingly growing attention from the research community, and is motivated by the numerous examples of such markets on the web and in electronic commerce, including: online advertising exchanges, stock exchanges, business-to-business commerce and bandwidth allocation. Many of these examples represent dynamic and uncertain environ...

The introduction of internet auction has significantly widened the pool of consumers who participate in auctions and increased the number of companies attempting to sell their products in an auction format. Previous empirical research on auctions has focused almost exclusively on the behavior of professional bidders. In this study, we collect data on a large number of internet auctions to explo...

The introduction of internet auction has significantly widened the pool of consumers who participate in auctions and increased the number of companies attempting to sell their products in an auction format. Previous empirical research on auctions has focused almost exclusively on the behavior of professional bidders. In this study, we collect data on a large number of internet auctions to explo...

Business information services are intermediaries that collect, collate, package and distribute information of value to professional users. We consider two technologies that such intermediaries may use for delivering information. First, a packaged design that uses physical media like CD-ROMs to distribute information. Second, an online service that delivers such information via the Internet or o...

The grocery industry evolved from mom-and-pop stores to mega-markets to online grocery buying, with many different forms along the way. The global market for groceries in 2000 is over $2 trillion. The online grocery segment of the market is expected to reach $34 billion by 2002, a thirty-three fold increase from 1998. This tutorial examines the issues surrounding online groceries and looks clos...