Trust that suppliers and buyers will keep their word is a necessary ingredient to a wellfunctioning marketplace. Nowhere is the issue trickier than for electronic markets, wheretransactions tend to be geographically diffuse and anonymous, putting them out of the reach ofthe legal safeguards and...

Each of several exchange partners is the monopoly owner of a specific commoditywhich she can share with others. It is optimal to keep the own endowment, but allwould gain by mutual gift exchange. Participants play the game repeatedly in constantgroups (partner design) and can establish stable...

This paper provides an overview on the simulations andexperiments we have done in order to better understandhuman-agent interaction in a market environment. We findthat the introduction of software agents does not necessarilyinduce a more efficient market. More surprisingly,information on the...

This paper studies how software agents influence the market behavior ofhuman traders. Programmed traders with a passive arbitrage seekingstrategy are introduced in a double auction market experiment with humansubjects in the laboratory. As a treatment variable, the influence ofinformation on the...

Auctions on the Internet provide a new source of data on how bidding is influenced by the detailed rules of the auction. Here we study the second-price auction run by eBay and Amazon, in which a bidder submits a reservation price, and has this (maximum) price used to bid for him by proxy.[...]

For the Euro 2000 Soccer Championships an experimental asset market was conducted, with traders buying and selling contracts on the winners of individual matches. Market-generated probabilites are compared to professional bet quotas, and factors that are responsible for the quality of the market...

The internet facilitates interactive and asynchronous communication among human and artificial agents in large bilateral markets. As a consequence, new institutional structures are emerging in the new economy. I discuss a few core problems associated with the economic design of internet markets...