Information goods vendors offer many different pricing schemes such as per user pricing, site licensing, etc. Why do some firms such as Microsoft offer multiple pricing schemes while others such as Apple’s iTunes and Salesforce.com limit themselves to a single pricing scheme? Why do competing sellers adopt different pricing schemes for the same information good? We show that pricing schemes aff...

We compare the behavior of car mechanics and college students as sellers in experimental credence goods markets. Finding largely similar behavior, we note much more overtreatment by car mechanics, probably due to decision heuristics they learned in their professional training. JEL classifications: C91, D82, C72

The paper presents the design of a software infrastructure that can support negotiation and competition among buyers and sellers of goods (auctioning) over the Internet. The goals of data integrity, responsiveness, and scalability have been achieved by replicating the auction service across a number of auction servers.

We investigate how information goods are priced and diffused over links in a network. A new equivalence relation between nodes captures the effects of network architecture locations sellers on division profits, characterizes topology competing (and potentially overlapping) diffusion paths. Sellers indirectly appropriate profits intermediation chains from buyers their classes. Links within same ...

Online markets play an important role for both online sellers and online buyers. Previous research has identified problems of information asymmetry in the online used goods markets, this research explore whether there are similar problems in the new-goods online markets. Grounded in “lemon market” theory, this study used panel data captured from eBay Motors. Employing Ordinary Least Squares ana...

Economic agents have the possibility to fund the protection of environmental public goods, such as natural ecosystems and biodiversity, facing unknown risks of collapse, which could help to back them up. On the base of the prediction markets, which meet with a degree of success since their introduction, we propose an evolutionary model of an option fund market for the threshold environmental pu...

With widespread globalization happening at an alarming speed, the manufacturing and copying of goods has become a matter of routine for counterfeiters. The Internet has provided a new advantage for counterfeiters the opportunity to sell goods without prior consumer inspection. Leveraging this opportunity, deceitful purveyors of imitation goods engage in unethical practices such as selling count...

We study the interaction between product quality, prices and demand in a dynamic model of asymmetric information. Sellers choose between producing high quality goods which gives low profits today but increases probability of future survival in the market and low quality ones which gives higher returns today but lowers future survival. However, demand depends on expected quality. Multiple steady...

In experiments subjects regularly trade off time and money at inconsistent rates, apparently becoming less sensitive to money when considering the purchase of a more-expensive item. In this paper I introduce a demand function that matches this behaviour, and derive the predictions for equilibrium market structure, and then finally discuss market evidence. The demand function is derived from a u...

What are the economic justifications for government intervention in the economy? In a market economy, prices coordinate the activities of buyers and sellers and convey information about the strength of consumer demand for a good and the costs of supplying it. Because trade is voluntary, buyers and sellers only make exchanges when both parties benefit. Under ideal market conditions, this process...