17233820
IT-enabled transparent electronic markets: the case of the air travel industry
The electronic market hypothesis predicts that by reducing coordination costs, information technology (IT) will shift industrial organization from hierarchical to market-based forms of economic activity. While academic researchers and practitioners have witnessed these shifts with the advent of the Internet, there is little understanding about the process and the underlying forces that drive them. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the air travel industry, which has recently experienced significant IT-driven transformations. We conclude that, together with IT, pro-competitive laws and the information-intensive nature of air travel products have triggered competition for consumers with transparent market mechanisms, which is leading to the emergence of more transparent electronic markets in the air travel industry.
62621279
Estimating Internet Users' Demand Characteristics
We investigate two parametric approaches and one non-parametric approach toestimating Internet users' value-of-time, an important characteristic ofdemand for Internet services. The advantages of these approaches are madeclear and their limitations discussed. The models are tested with datagenerated from our similation model of the Internet economy. Given thecharacteristics of the data, we investigate parametric count-data modelsfirst. While reasonably good results are obtained on all medium- andlarge-sized jobs, the method fails on small-sized ones. Second, we develop anonparametric quasi-Bayesian update algorithm for retrieving the underlyingdistribution function of Internet users' value-of-time purely fromobservations on their choices. Compared with the parametric count-data models,good results are obtained in every case.
15296084
Designing online selling mechanisms: Transparency levels and prices
Sellers increasingly compete with innovative Internet-based selling mechanisms, revealing or concealing market information. Transparency strategy involves design choices by firms that influence the availability and accessibility of information about products and prices. We develop decision support models for suppliers to set prices for online mechanisms with different transparency levels. We then empirically analyze the price levels set by airlines across transparent and opaque online travel agencies. Our results suggest that airlines can increase profit by increasing price differentials or influencing OTA transparency differences. We also discuss application generality and limitations of our results.
5555268
User Heterogeneity and its Impact on Electronic Auction Market Design: An Empirical Exploration1Research Essays
While traditional information systems research emphasizes understanding of end users from perspectives such as cognitive fit and technology acceptance, it fails to consider the economic dimensions of their interactions with a system. When viewed as economic agents who participate in electronic markets, it is easy to see that users' preferences, behaviors, personalities, and ultimately their economic welfare are intricately linked to the design of information systems. We use a data-driven, inductive approach to develop a taxonomy of bidding behavior in online auctions. Our analysis indicates significant heterogeneity exists in the user base of these representative electronic markets. Using online auction data from 1999 and 2000, we find a stable taxonomy of bidder behavior containing five types of bidding strategies. Bidders pursue different bidding strategies that, in aggregate, realize different winning likelihoods and consumer surplus. We find that technological evolution has an impact on bidders' strategies. We demonstrate how the taxonomy of bidder behavior can be used to enhance the design of some types of information systems. These enhancements include developing user-centric bidding agents, inferring bidders' underlying valuations to facilitate real-time auction calibration, and creating low-risk computational platforms for decision making.
7914809
Predicting Bidders' Willingness to Pay in Online Multiunit Ascending Auctions: Analytical and Empirical Insights
We develop a real-time estimation approach to predict bidders' maximum willingness to pay in a multiunit ascending uniform-price and discriminatory-price (Yankee) online auction. Our two-stage approach begins with a bidder classification step, which is followed by an analytical prediction model. The classification model identifies bidders as either adopting a myopic best-response (MBR) bidding strategy or a non-MBR strategy. We then use a generalized bid-inversion function to estimate the willingness to pay for MBR bidders. We empirically validate our two-stage approach using data from two popular online auction sites. Our joint classification-and-prediction approach outperforms two other naive prediction strategies that draw random valuations between a bidder's current bid and the known market upper bound. Our prediction results indicate that, on average, our estimates are within 2% of bidders' revealed willingness to pay for Yankee and uniform-price multiunit auctions. We discuss how our results can facilitate mechanism-design changes such as dynamic-bid increments and dynamic buy-it-now prices.
10087934
Comparative analysis of multi-item online auctions: evidence from the laboratory
Abstract The dynamics of customer relationship are being reshaped by price-setting processes such as online auctions. This paper analyzes price setting process in business-to-consumer (B2C) online auctions. Typically, these auctions involve multiple identical units and utilize a variant of the traditional English-auction mechanism. We describe an online laboratory experiment that compares the efficiency of such a mechanism with a multi-item version of Vickrey's [Journal of Finance 41 (1961) 8.] second-price auction with respect to both seller's revenue and allocative efficiency. Our results reject the revenue equivalence principle and indicate that English auctions may dominate the Vickrey auctions. However, we observe that the allocative efficiency of Vickrey auctions is higher than the English auctions.
3094106
LIPTUS: associating structured and unstructured information in a banking environment
Growing competition has made today's banks understand the value of knowing their customers better. In this paper, we describe a tool, LIPTUS, that associates the customer interactions (emails and transcribed phone calls) with customer and account profiles stored in an existing data warehouse. The associations discovered by LIPTUS enable analytics spanning the customer and account profiles on one hand and the meta-data associated or derived from the interaction (using text mining techniques) on the other. We illustrate the value derived from this consolidated analysis through specific customer intelligence applications. LIPTUS is today being extensively used in a large bank in India. A highlight of this paper is a discussion of the technical challenges encountered while building LIPTUS and deploying it on real-life customer data.
17420676
A workstation's communication performance benchmark
In this paper we propose a communication benchmark suite: BTU(Bits To the User). In the BTU benchmarking process, the vendor supplies a workstation running a UNIX* operating system, we install our benchmark program and connect the workstation to a testbed which emulates a LAN/WAN environment. The benchmark run will submit the workstation to a carefully designed combination of tests. The result is a predictor of what the user, at the application level, can expect in terms of bits sent to or received from a remote host. Our benchmark takes into account concurrent activities such as CPU and I/O activities which compete for resources on the test machine. The combination of these activities and concurrent activities on the network will interfere with the test machine’s communication performance. The automated BTU benchmark test suite produces results at various levels of abstractions ranging from a single number, characterizing average performance in the style of SPEC92, to a TCP time sequence chart for abnormal behaviors. We intend to serve the user of a workstation by providing information which should enable the users to make a reasonable judgment when acquiring a workstation with a specific configuration within certain cost constraints. Our results when used along with existing benchmarks will make a powerful combination for predicting overall performance. Neither price nor SPECmarks are as good a predictor of communication performance as that measured by BTUs. We conclude this paper with a discussion of extensions to faster networks and our plans for having the community accept this proposal as a communication benchmark.
37839097
Retaining personal expression for social search
Web is being extensively used for personal expression, which includes ratings, reviews, recommendations, blogs. This user created content, e.g. book review on Amazon.com, becomes the property of the website, and the user often does not have easy access to it. In some cases, user's feedback may get averaged with feedback from other users e.g. ratings of a video. We argue that the creator of such content needs to be able to retain (a link to) her created content. We introduce the concept of MEB which is a user controlled store of such retained links. A MEB allows a user to access/share all the reviews she has given on different websites. With this capability users can allow their friends to search through their feedback. Searching through one's social network allows harnessing the power of social networks where known relationships provide the context & trust necessary to interpret feedback.
18542805
IT infrastructure in emerging markets: arguing for an end-to-end perspective
To help sustain large-scale pervasive computing in emerging markets, researchers must address unique challenges in the delivery fabric and enterprise backbone. Such challenges present opportunities for high impact innovation. Although most research organizations have focused on developing consumer-facing solutions, we posit that future research must take an end-to-end perspective. That is, researchers must not only consider the front end (such as consumer devices) but also the medium to reach the consumer (for example, the delivery fabric) and the back end (for example, the enterprise backbone) to create an economically sustainable, scalable solution. Although our end-to-end perspective generalizes to all emerging markets, in this article, we mainly discuss the Indian market from which we based our observations.
207164100
Clustering short texts using wikipedia
Subscribers to the popular news or blog feeds (RSS/Atom) often face the problem of information overload as these feed sources usually deliver large number of items periodically. One solution to this problem could be clustering similar items in the feed reader to make the information more manageable for a user. Clustering items at the feed reader end is a challenging task as usually only a small part of the actual article is received through the feed. In this paper, we propose a method of improving the accuracy of clustering short texts by enriching their representation with additional features from Wikipedia. Empirical results indicate that this enriched representation of text items can substantially improve the clustering accuracy when compared to the conventional bag of words representation.