The provisioning of complex services requires tight collaborationbetween diverse service providers and their customers harmonizing supply anddemand chains to a highly flexible, dynamic and decentralized service value network.Peers in such a network autonomously delegate (sub-)tasks which...

Auction fever is a multifaceted phenomenon thatis frequently observed in both traditional and Internetauctions. In order to gain a better understanding of itscauses, we develop a conceptual framework to analyzeemotions in auctions, which is based on an exhaustiveliterature review. The framework...

At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Graduate School InformationManagement and Market Engineering (IME) which is financed by the GermanResearch Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), offers an interdisciplinarydoctoral program on the economic, technological and legal...

Innovation and technological change has always been recognized as a motor for economicgrowth in economic literature. It is also agreed amongst economists that competition fostersinnovation, and thus, is an essential component of economic progress (Teece, 1992).Coase (1937, p. 388) remarks in his...

Once serving the whole value chain by what has become known as vertical integration,companies have long since started to outsource value creation processesto specialized partners. Moreover, societal changes have induced a paradigm shiftfrom product-driven to service-dominated value creation....

Since the advent of the Internet, electronic commerce has become an integral partof everyday life in most parts of the world. In 2009 private consumers in Germanypurchased goods and services worth 15.5bn EUR via e-commerce market places onthe Internet, an increase of 14.4% over the year before....

Auctions are nowadays a popular and frequently employed market mechanism in electronicmarkets. In economic literature, the success of electronic auctions has been largelyattributed to the reduction of transaction costs, the large number of potential buyers,and the independence of time and space....

This citation by Robert Neal and Simon Wheatley from their 1998 article about investorsentiment offers several insights and paves the way for this first chapter by making thefollowing statements: First, the opinion of individual investors on the market isimportant. Second, they are often wrong....

Increasing the shares of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and Distributed EnergyResources (DER) is one of the most important levers in many countries to cope withthe environmental, political, and economic challenges of future energy supply. Theunderlying question of this thesis is whether...

Autonomous agents are widely applied to automate interactions in robotics,e.g. for selling and purchasing goods on eBay, and in financial markets, e.g. in theform of quote machines and algorithmic traders. Current research investigates efficienteconomic mechanisms that fully automate the...