Forecasting the price in online auctions is important for buyers and sellers. With good forecasts, bidders can make informed bidding decisions and sellers can select the right time and place to list their products. While information from other auctions can help forecast an ongoing auction, it...

The flexibility of time and location as well as the availability of an abundance of both old and new products makes online auctions an important part of people's daily shopping experience. While many bidders rely on variants of the well-documented early or last-minutes bidding strategies,...

Applying statistical tools to help understand business processes and make informed business decisions has attracted enormous amount of research interests in recent years. In this dissertation, we develop and apply data mining techniques to two sources of data, online bidding data for eBay and...

Purpose – This paper therefore aims at systematically estimating the agricultural trade induced farm employment effects in China. Design/methodology/approach – Using detailed agricultural trade and production data during 1994‐2009, the authors estimate the “labor contents” of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether China is still a passive price taker from the US soybean futures, or instead domestic futures market has developed certain degrees of pricing power through time. The finding helps to identify the importance of China soybean futures in...

In the pharmaceutical industry, sales representatives visit doctors to inform them of their products and encourage them to become an active prescriber. On a daily basis, pharmaceutical sales representatives must decide which doctors to visit and the order to visit them. This situation motivates...