58 percent of the jobs in the United Stated are created by firms with fewer than 500 employees (Davis, et al. [1998]). Yet, there is only limited research done on the industry trends and conditions affecting small company sale transactions. The small business industry has very different dynamics...

Existing preference reasoning systems have been successful in simple domains. Broader success requires more natural and more expressive preference representations. This thesis develops a representation of logical preferences that combines numerical tradeoff ratios between partial outcome...

In many studies of market microstructure, theoretical analysis quickly becomes in tractable for all but the simplest stylized models. This thesis considers two alternative approaches, namely, the use of experiments with human subjects and simulations with intelligent agents, to address some of...