We consider a general family of auction mechanisms that admit multiple buyers and sellers, and determine market-clearing prices. We analyze the economic incentives facing participants in such auctions, demonstrating that, under some conditions, it is possible to induce truthful revelation of values by buyers or sellers, but not both, and for single- but not multi-unit bids. We also perform a computational analysis of the auctioneer's task, exhibiting efficient algorithms for processing bids and calculating allocations.

A proper understanding of the general nature, potential and obligations of electronic services may be achieved by examining existing commercial services in detail. The everyday services that surround us, and the ways in which we engage with them, are the result of social and economic interaction that has taken place over a long period of time. If we attempt to provide electronic services, and do not take this history into account, then we will fail. Any attempt to provide automated electronic services that ignores this history will deny consumers the opportunity to negotiate and refine, over a large range of issues, the specific details of the actual service to be provided. To succeed, we require a rich and accurate means of representing services. An essential ingredient of service representation is capturing the non-functional properties of services. These include the methods of charging and payment, the channels by which the service is requested and provided, constraints on temporal and spatial availability, service quality, security, trust and the rights attached to a service. Not only are comprehensive descriptions essential for useful service discovery, they are also integral to service management, enabling service negotiation, composition, and substitution. This paper builds on an understanding of services and their interactions, to outline the non-functional properties of services and their uses.

this paper.

As the number and diversity of electronic commerce participants grows, the complexity of purchasing from a vast and dynamic array of goods and services needs to be hidden from the end user. Putting the complexityinto the commerce system instead means providing #exible middleware for enabling commerce within di#erent commercial communities. In this paper, we present one such commerce middleware component --- an Auction Manager designed to simplify and automate both the creation of new markets and the matching of users to existing markets. The Auction Manager determines which markets are appropriate for a given buyer or seller using market-speci#c inference rules applied to the current market o#erings. We also showhow these same inference rules can be used by the Auction Manager to automatically compose and decompose market o#erings to respond to changing conditions within the marketplace. Finally,we describe how the Auction Manager provides a focal point for expressing policy decisions ...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview on the Virtual Laboratory infrastructure for online economic experiments. We summarize our experience gained from performing several economic experiments on the Internet. The experiments we have run range from electronic markets to individual decision making. From there we synthesize and evaluate a set of methodological issues in performing economic experiments on the Internet. As a result for further exploration we sketch the design of an infrastructure that allows the automated execution of Internet experiments including marketing of experiments, control of application and participation, payment system integration, and evaluation of results. The infrastructure also aims at providing a generic interface for third parties to register and run experiments.

Lacking payment systems become a bottleneck for the vision of the Information Economy. In many cases payments of fractions of a cent, so-called micropayments, are of particular interest. In this paper we propose a framework to evaluate payment systems. The framework consists of a well structured parameter vector of desired attributes. For the evaluation of attribute values we suggest to use VTS diagrams from object oriented analysis and design. The framework is applied to DigiCash, SET and First Virtual. Keywords: micropayments, electronic commerce The financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Sonderforschungsbereich 373) is gratefully acknowledged. y Institut fur Wirtschaftsinformatik, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Spandauer Str. 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany, cschmidt@wiwi.hu-berlin.de z Institut fur Wirtschaftsinformatik, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Spandauer Str. 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany, rmueller@wiwi.hu-berlin.de CONTENTS 2 Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 Dr...

1 Even before the Internet bubble, online payment was viewed as a promising technology [4, 22]. But in spite of the potentially large demand, such systems have failed to become a major method of online financial transactions. Based on the analysis of existing online payment systems, we propose QuickPay as a new online payment protocol. QuickPay is a middleware framework built for online payment and has the potential to be used for other online financial transactions. The purpose of QuickPay is to serve as a highly effective, user-anonymous, secure infrastructure for online transfer of financial data at a low transaction cost. In this report, we will introduce the underlying motivation and provide a detailed design of the QuickPay system. We will describe in detail the QuickPay business and technical goals, general architecture, major players, and relationship among the players. To show how QuickPay works, we implement two general online payment protocols (micropayment and Regular Payment) and other basic administration and communication protocols. After evaluate QuickPay’s security and