EC

With the recent technological feasibility of electronic commerce over the Internet, much attention has been given to the design of electronic markets for various types of electronically-tradable goods. Such markets, however, will normally need to ...

We study the following problem: A seller wishes to sell an item to a group of self-interested agents. Each agent i has a privately known valuation vⁱ for the object. Given a distribution on these valuations, our goal is to construct an auction that ...

In most of microeconomic theory, consumers are assumed to exhibit decreasing marginal utilities. This paper considers combinatorial auctions among such buyers. The valuations of such buyers are placed within a hierarchy of valuations that exhibit no ...

An ascending-bid auction protocol with a fixed end time has been widely used at many Internet auction sites. At these sites, we can observe bidders engaging in the behavior called last minute bidding, namely, a large fraction of the bids for a good are ...

As electronic commerce environments become more and more interactive, privacy is a matter of increasing concern. Many surveys have investigated households' privacy attitudes and concerns, revealing a general desire among Internet users to protect their ...

A Location Based Service (LBS) is a service where knowledge of the location of an object or individual is used to personalise the service. Typical examples include the E911 emergency location service in the US and 'Where is the nearest xx' type of ...

We present a novel methodology for predicting future outcomes that uses small numbers of individuals participating in an imperfect information market. By determining their risk attitudes and performing a nonlinear aggregation of their predictions, we ...

Web sites allow the collection of vast amounts of navigational data -- clickstreams of user traversals through the site. These massive data stores offer the tantalizing possibility of uncovering interesting patterns within the dataset. For e-businesses, ...

Information goods can be reconfigured at low cost. Therefore, firms can choose how to differentiate their products at a frequency comparable to price changes. However, doing so effectively is complicated by uncertainty about customer preferences, ...

Distribution of content, such as music, remains one of the main drivers of P2P development. Subscription-based services are currently receiving a lot of attention from the content industry as a viable business model for P2P content distribution. One of ...

In the near future, dynamic pricing will be a common competitive maneuver. In this age of digital markets, sellers in electronic marketplaces can implement automated and frequent adjustments to prices and can easily imagine how this will increase their ...

A major achievement of mechanism design theory is the family of truthful mechanisms often called VCG (named after Vickrey, Clarke and Groves). Although these mechanisms have many appealing properties, their essential intractability prevents them from ...

This paper introduces RoxyBot, one of the top-scoring agents in the First International Trading Agent Competition. A TAC agent simulates one vision of future travel agents: it represents a set of clients in simultaneous auctions, trading complementary (...

We propose a heuristic for allocation in combinatorial auctions. We first run an approximation algorithm on the linear programming relaxation of the combinatorial auction. We then run a sequence of greedy algorithms, starting with the order on the bids ...

Different communication media create different shopping experiences, e.g., the phone vs. the web. In this study, we examined the early formation of trust and the likelihood that a shopper will return to a website for subsequent purchases. Consumers were ...

The task of evaluating and ranking items with multiple-attributes appears in many guises in commerce. Examples include evaluating responses to a request for quotes (RFQ) for some item and comparison shopping for an item within one or more catalogs. This ...

Ratings for products and services are increasingly important on the Internet, as they allow users to harvest the wisdom of the community in making decisions. However, the difficulty with ratings is that little is known about the people providing them. ...

This paper investigates the potential of recommendation agents for electronic shopping to influence human decision making by shaping user preferences. Specifically, we examine how the type of information that is elicited by a shopping agent for use in ...

This paper introduces a model for analyzing marketplaces, such as eBay, which rely on binary reputation mechanisms for quality signaling and quality control. In our model sellers keep their actual quality private and choose what quality to advertise. ...

We explore a scenario in which a monopolist producer of information goods seeks to maximize its profits in a market where consumer demand shifts frequently and unpredictably. The producer may set an arbitrarily complex price schedule---a function that ...

Certain services may be provided in a continuous, one-dimensional, ordered range of different qualities and a customer requiring a service of quality q can only be offered a quality superior or equal to q. Only a discrete set of different qualities will ...

This paper explores the role of user modelling in live help systems for e-commerce web sites. There are several potential benefits with user modelling in this context: 1) Human assistants can use the personal information in the user models to provide ...

XML-based vocabularies have become more and more popular in application-to-application exchanges. Like traditional EDI standards, XML-based formats require an additional agreement on rules to access XML-based data structures. It is our goal to define a ...

The amount of attention space available for recommending suppliers to consumers on e-commerce sites is typically limited. We present a competitive distributed recommendation mechanism based on adaptive software agents for efficiently allocating the "...

We develop two bidding algorithms for real-time Continuous Double Auctions (CDAs) using a variety of market rules that offer what we believe to be the strongest known performance of any published bidding strategy. Our algorithms are based on extensions ...

We present a methodology for maximizing profits in a general class of e-commerce environments. The cost model is based on revenues that are generated when Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees are satisfied and on penalties that are incurred otherwise. ...

The Quality of Service (QoS) of e-commerce sites plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers. The workload experienced by these sites tends to vary in a very dynamic way. The complexity of the sites combined with the large short-terms ...

In order for current e-Businesses to mature from hastily assembled systems and applications, formal processes must be put in place for planning and budgeting, pricing and costing, and for establishing quality of service and service--level assurances. ...

We explore the problem of sharing network resources when agents' preferences lead to temporally concentrated, inefficient use of the network. In such cases, external incentives must be supplied to smooth out demand. Taking a game-theoretic approach, we ...