A significant portion of the electricity network capacity is built to run only a few days a year when demand peaks. As a result, expensive power generation plants and equipment costing millions of dollars are sitting idle most of the time, which increases costs for everyone. We present randomized load control, a simple distributed approach for scheduling smart appliances. Randomized load contro...

The amount of products and services available over the Internet increases significantly and it soon becomes beyond users ability to analyze and compare them. At the same time the number of potential customers available via the Internet also increases dramatically and starts to be beyond the service providers ability to perform efficient targeted marketing. A possible way for relaxing the above-...

Rapid transformation in marketing information technologies has enabled corporations to build ample consumer databases and analyze those using sophisticated data-mining techniques to obtain extensive knowledge about those consumers’ personal life styles and private matters. Considering that the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has relied on fair information principles to guide privac...

When a firm can recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their past purchases in order to price discriminate. We study a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers have the ability to maintain their anonymity and avoid being identified as past customers, possibly at a cost. When consumers can freely maintain their anonymity, they al...

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 532 I. OVERVIEW OF SMART GRID DEVELOPMENT ....................... 533 II. WHY NUSP-CONSUMER INTERACTIONS SHOULD BE REGULATED .............................................................................. 534 A. What are NUSPs and How Do They Interact with Consumers? ....................................

It is well known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. With heterogeneous consumers and incomplete information about individual consumers’ types, monopoly pricing entails second-degree price discrimination with inefficient contracts for low dema...

The marriage of computer and telecommunications technologies has created a new electronic networking environment on which business and services are delivered. Today, anyone who has a connection to the Internet is able to access easily an abundance of information that is made available online. No doubt, the technological advancement will eventually transform the way many organizations operate an...

Privacy concerns have, at least in part, impeded the adoption of radio frequency identification (RFID) in retail. The adoption of other automatic identification (auto-ID) applications shows that consumers often are willing to trade their privacy or their control of personal information against some value afforded by the application. In this paper, the interplay between privacy, value, and contr...

E-commerce adoption has been extensive but for some specialized areas it is still in the early stages. One such area is health-related websites where the sensitive issues around the consumer’s health extenuate the similar challenges faced in other areas of e-commerce. Disclosing personal information is necessary to fully utilize such health-related websites but consumer trust is required for th...