We examine the procurement process selection problem of a large industrial buyer who employs reverse auctions for awarding procurement contracts. We contrast two classes of commonly used strategies under multiple sourcing; namely, single-stage reverse auctions, and two-stage processes where...

The implementation of an energy service company (ESCO) project in developing countries may result not only in reduced energy cost but also in considerable environmental benefits, including the reduction of CO2 emissions, which can be assessed in an economic manner under the Clean Development...

Along with the continuing global warming, the environmental constraints are expected to play more and more important role in the operation of distributed energy resource (DER) systems, besides the economic objective. In this study, a multi-objective optimization model is developed to analyze the...

We study the effect of user incentives on software security in a network of individual users under costly patching and negative network security externalities. For proprietary software or freeware, we compare four alternative policies to manage network security: (i) consumer self-patching (where...

We examine the competition between procurement auctions and long-term relational contracts that emerges from the increased usage of electronic marketplaces. Procurement auctions create supply chain efficiencies by selecting the least costly bidder, and long-term relational contracts ensure the...

Two single-product firms with different quality levels and fixed limited capacities engage in sequential price competition in an essentially deterministic model where customers have heterogeneous valuations for both products. We develop conditions under which the leader (she) can take strategic...

In recent years, vendor liability for software security vulnerabilities has been the center of an important debate in the software community and a topic gaining government attention in legislative committees and hearings. The importance of this question surrounding vendor security liability is...

In a variety of industries ranging from agriculture to electronics and oil, procurement takes place through a combination of bilateral fixed-price contracts and open market trading among supply chain participants, which allows them to improve supply chain performance by utilizing new demand and...

Online market places have an unprecedented power of bringing together a large number of buyers and sellers and aggregating information. Despite its benefits, this scale of aggregation of private information may bring about adverse effects that can cause inefficiencies, which can be ignored by...

I present a strategic model of a bilateral oligopoly with asymmetric information to examine (i) the validity of the conjecture of price-taking behavior in such markets as the number of agents becomes large and (ii) the effect of the rate that individual information precision decreases with...