Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with various strategic problems, depending on preference structure. As long as bids represent non-repudiable offers, submitting noncontingent bids to separate auctions entails an exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of...

Information goods are characterized by high fixed (first-copy) costs, but very low costs for the production of additional copies. Marginal costs of electronically-delivered information goods have been further reduced by the remarkable recent decline in computing and digital communication costs....

In an economy in which a producer must learn the preferences of a consumer population, it is faced with a classic decision problem: when to explore and when to exploit. If the producer has a limited number of chances to experiment, it must explicitly consider the cost of learning (in terms of...

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 is free to set an arbitrarily complex price schedule-a function that maps the set of purchased items to a...

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, compounded by the fact that the search for a good...

In many recent antitrust cases, manufacturers of complex high-technology equipment have been accused of exercising market power in the sale of proprietary service or parts necessary to maintain the machines they produce. The manufacturer generally concedes that it has market power in selling the...

In an automated market for electronic goods new problems arise that have not been well studied previously. For example, information goods are very flexible. Marginal costs are negligible and nearly limitless bundling and unbundling of these items are possible, in contrast to physical goods....

Bilateral negotiation over a single good or service is a fundamental problem for automated systems, and is surprisingly resistant to general solutions. In this paper we offer advice and new results for the design of electronic negotiation and market systems. We review the theoretical and...

Many online systems for bilateral transactions elicit performance feedback from both transacting partners. Such bilateral feedback giving introduces strategic considerations. We focus on reciprocity in the giving of feedback: how prevalent a strategy of giving feedback is only if feedback is...

Computer automation has the potential, just starting to be realized, of transforming thedesign and operation of markets, and the behaviors of agents trading in them. We discussthe possibilities for automating markets, presenting a broad conceptual frameworkcovering resource allocation as well as...