Automated agents are increasingly being used to interact on behalf of individuals and organizations in electronic markets. Agents are used, for example, to explore the set of possible contracts and to trade in communication bandwidth. Users choose agents which are then matched on various...

Automated agents for electronic markets are very valuable when a large amount of information must be processed quickly or employing human traders is not cost-effective. In markets for communication bandwidth, rights to transmit data are traded through a network. Since demand fluctuates...

Traditional economic wisdom says that free entry in a market will drive profits down to zero. This paper shows that profits may remain bounded away from zero when firms have to make a negligible small investment to learn the demand.

This paper presents a model of coordination failures based on market power and local oligopoly. The economy exhibits a multiplicity of Pareto-ranked equilibria. The introduction of uncertainty generates an endogenous equilibrium selection process, due to a strategic use of information by firms....

We formally incorporate the option to gather information into a game and thus endogenize the information structure. We ask whether models with exogenous information structures are robust with respect to this endogenization. Any Nash equilibrium of the game with information acquisition induces a...

Much of the economic value of electronic commerce comes from the automation of interactions between businesses and individuals. Game theory is a useful set of tools that can be used by designers of electronic-commerce applications in analyzing and engineering of automated agents and...

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...

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...