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...

International cooperation on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, disarmament, or free trade needs to be negotiated. The success of such negotiations depends on how they are designed. In the context of international climate change policy, it has been proposed [e.g., Weitzman J of the...

Applying an evolutionary framework, we investigate how a reputation mechanism and abuyer insurance (as used on Internet market platforms such as eBay) interact to promote trustworthinessand trust. Our analysis suggests that the costs involved in giving reliable feedbackdetermine the gains from...

Voting is a natural context to investigate how democratic societies balance claims of economic efficiency against claims of distributive equity. We examine data from a series of simple experimental voting games; in each, voters are confronted with two distributional policies, one that promotes...

In experimental bargaining with incomplete information, we vary the information distribution (symmetric and asymmetric), the direction of electronic prepaycommunication (no, one-way, and two way), and the electronic communication medium (email and video) Bargainig outcomes are influenced by the...

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as ebay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that...