Many online systems for bilateral transactions elicit performance feedback from both transacting partners. Such bilateral feedback giving introduces strategic considerations. We focus on reciprocity in the giving of feedback: how prevalent a strategy of giving feedback is only if feedback is...

Technological developments have been reshaping existing markets and giving rise to new ones. In my dissertation, I address several questions that emerged as a result of these changes. In the first two chapters, I study strategies in two different markets: a simultaneous ascending auction (SAA)...

Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with various strategic problems, depending on preference structure. As long as bids represent non-repudiable offers, submitting noncontingent bids to separate auctions entails an exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of...

This dissertation addresses three questions that arise out of the voluntary and subjective provision of feedback and its subjective interpretation. The first study is an experimental investigation of a mechanism designed to give buyers incentives for feedback provision. It starts from the...

Computer automation has the potential, just starting to be realized, of transforming thedesign and operation of markets, and the behaviors of agents trading in them. We discussthe possibilities for automating markets, presenting a broad conceptual frameworkcovering resource allocation as well as...

In a market-based scheduling mechanism, the allocation of time-specific resources to tasks is governed by a competitive bidding process. Agents bidding for multiple, separately allocated time slots face the risk that they will succeed in obtaining only part of their requirement, incurring...

Before the Web, the story of online information services was largely one of over-estimates and unmet expectations. This study examines sustained use and non-use of online services within organizations in a way that overcomes limitations of the traditional approaches that repeatedly led to...

In an economy in which a producer must learn the preferences of a consumer population, it is faced with a classic decision problem: when to explore and when to exploit. If the producer has a limited number of chances to experiment, it must explicitly consider the cost of learning (in terms of...

We explore a scenario in which a monopolist producer of information goods seeks to maximize its profits in a market where consumer demand shifts frequently and unpredictably. The producer is free to set an arbitrarily complex price schedule-a function that maps the set of purchased items to a...

Information goods can be reconfigured at low cost. Therefore, firms can choose how to differentiate their products at a frequency comparable to price changes. However, doing so effectively is complicated by uncertainty about customer preferences, compounded by the fact that the search for a good...