In many recent antitrust cases, manufacturers of complex high-technology equipment have been accused of exercising market power in the sale of proprietary service or parts necessary to maintain the machines they produce. The manufacturer generally concedes that it has market power in selling the...

America Online (AOL) is the largest, and in some aspects dominant, firm in the aggregation and distribution of content and services over the Internet. AOL is also the largest provider of Internet access in the U.S. Overall, it is the most successful firm in the business of online services, or...

Information goods are characterized by high fixed (first-copy) costs, but very low costs for the production of additional copies. Marginal costs of electronically-delivered information goods have been further reduced by the remarkable recent decline in computing and digital communication costs....

In an automated market for electronic goods new problems arise that have not been well studied previously. For example, information goods are very flexible. Marginal costs are negligible and nearly limitless bundling and unbundling of these items are possible, in contrast to physical goods....

Bilateral negotiation over a single good or service is a fundamental problem for automated systems, and is surprisingly resistant to general solutions. In this paper we offer advice and new results for the design of electronic negotiation and market systems. We review the theoretical and...