This study investigates whether U.S. corn merchants can effectively manage the overnight price risk of cash corn purchased after the Chicago Board of Trade closes at 1:15 p.m. on either the electronic Project A market or in the corn contract traded on the Tokyo Grain Exchange. While neither...

Do firms have proper incentives to invest in electronic coordination? We discuss this question in an oligopoly model with a local firm and a distant competitor that may reduce transport costs by investing in electronic coordination. In a two-stage game with investment in the first stage and...

Information systems can serve as intermediaries between the buyers and the sellers in a market creating an "electronic marketplace" that lowers the buyers' cost to acquire information about seller prices and product offerings. As a result, electronic marketplaces reduce the inefficiencies caused...

This paper presents an introductory survey for this special issue of Management Science on electronic markets. We acquaint the reader with some fundamental concepts in the study of electronic market mechanisms, while simultaneously presenting a survey and summary of the essential literature in...

E-commerce has proved to be fertile ground for new business models, which may be patented (for up to 20 years) and have potentially far-reaching impact on the e-commerce landscape. One such electronic market is the reverse-auction model popularized by Priceline.com. There is still uncertainty...

Most online feedback mechanisms rely on voluntary reporting of privately observed outcomes. This introduces the potential for reporting bias, a situation where traders exhibit different propensities to report different outcome types to the system. Unless properly accounted for, reporting bias...

Online feedback mechanisms harness the bidirectional communication capabilities of the Internet to engineer large-scale, word-of-mouth networks. Best known so far as a technology for building trust and fostering cooperation in online marketplaces, such as eBay, these mechanisms are poised to...

Prior literature has documented the performance benefits from the use of electronic data interchange (EDI) and the Internet. Using purchase and fulfillment records from the U.S. government's Federal Supply Service, we provide a direct comparison of performance between a private network EDI...

We examine the impact of reduced search costs on prices of commodity products in electronic marketplaces. Conventionally, reduced consumer search costs may be expected to engender stronger price competition between firms, resulting in lower prices and improved consumer welfare. This notion was...

Forecasts of macroeconomic variables as the inflation rate serve as important guidelines for the private as well as the public sector. At least central banks that adopted an inflation targeting regime are in urgent need of high quality inflation forecasts. Accurate inflation forecasts are also...