Despite the recent misfortunes of many dotcoms, e-commerce will have major and lasting effects on economic activity. But the rise and fall in the valuations of the first wave of e-commerce companies show that vague promises of distant profits are insufficient. Only business models based on sound...

The paper considers the consequences of competition between two widely used exchange mechanisms, a "decentralized bargaining" market, and a "centralized" market. In every period, members of a large heterogenous group of privately-informed traders who each wish to buy or sell one unit of some...

For any organisation, saving on procurement costs has an impact on profitability that is multiplied by gross margin. Although much research focus has been placed on achieving the lowest possible cost for the goods/services purchased we concern ourselves here with the operational procurement...

This paper analyzes automated distributive negotiation where agents have firm deadlines that are private information. The agents are allowed to make and accept offers in any order in continuous time. We show that the only sequential equilibrium outcome is one where the agents wait until the...

We describe an experiment where buyers and sellers, endowed with heterogeneous deadlines, are randomly matched and attempt to reach agreement over the division of a fixed surplus. The theoretical models that provide the background for this experiment have been developed in recent papers by...

The economic boom of the USA in the 1990s was remarkable in its duration, the sustained rise in equipment investment, the reduced volatility of productivity growth, and continued uncertainty about the trend growth rate. In this paper we link these phenomena using an extension of the classic...

We consider a dynamic model where traders in each period are matched randomly into pairs who then bargain about the division of a fixed surplus. When agreement is reached the traders leave the market. Traders who do not come to an agreement return next period in which they will be matched again,...