History has seen many examples of the lone man ñ like Christ, Luther, Gandhi, or Hitler -- who without initial wealth or position, succeeds in changing the behavior of an entire society, for good or for ill. Whence comes this power. No doubt such leaders have possessed extraordinary ability,...

In the ascending-price auctions with Yahoo!-type buy-it-now (BIN), we characterize and derive the closed-form solution for the optimal bidding strategy of the bidder and the optimal BIN price of the seller when they are both risk-averse. The seller is shown to be strictly better o with the BIN...

The author constructs a theoretical model to examine the effects of an inherent conflict of interest between a seller of a house and the real estate broker hired by the seller. The model is then used to calibrate the broker’s commission rates that would maximize the seller’s expected gain....

The paper investigates the reasons why person-to-person electronic funds transfers are still not very common in the United States compared with practices in many other countries. The paper also describes recent enhancements to online and mobile banking that provide account holders with low-cost...

This paper surveys a variety of topics related to network economics. Topics covered include: consumer demand under network effects, compatibility decisions and standardization, technology advances in network industries, two-sided markets, information networks and intellectual property, and...