Group Discounts Compatible with Buyer Privacy

We show how group discounts can be offered without forcing buyers to surrender their anonymity, as long as buyers can use their own computing devices (e.g. smartphone, tablet or computer) to perform a purchase. Specifically, we present a protocol for privacy-preserving group discounts. The protocol allows a group of buyers to prove how many they are without disclosing their identities. Coupled with an anonymous payment system, this makes group discounts compatible with buyer privacy (that is, buyer anonymity).Comment: Presented at 9th DPM International Workshop on Data Privacy Management (DPM 2014, Sep. 10,2014). To appear in workshop proceedings, LNCS, Springe

Privacy-Preserving Group Discounts

How can a buyer legitimately benefit from group discounts while preserving his privacy? We show how this can be achieved when buyers can use their own computing device (e.g. smartphone or computer) to perform a purchase. Specifically, we present a protocol for privacy-preserving group discounts. The protocol allows a group of buyers to prove how many they are without disclosing their identities. Coupled with an anonymous payment system, this allows group discounts to be compatible with buyer privacy.This work was partly funded by Google through a Faculty Research Award to the first author, who is also partially supported by the Government of Catalonia through an ICREA Acadèmia Prize. The following partial supports are also gratefully acknowledged: the Spanish Government under projects TIN2011-27076-C03-01 “CO-PRIVACY” and CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00004 “ARES”, and the European Commission under FP7 projects “DwB” and “Inter-Trust”

Implementing Privacy Negotiations in E-Commerce

This paper examines how service providers may resolve the trade-off between their personalization efforts and users' individual privacy concerns. Finding that neither an optimized one-size-fits-all strategy, nor a market-driven specialization of providers or choices between different usage scenarios can solve the problem, we analyze how negotiation techniques can lead to efficient contracts and how they can be integrated into current technologies. The analysis includes the identification of relevant and negotiable privacy dimensions for different usage domains. Negotiations in multi-channel retailing are examined as a detailed example. Based on a formalization of the user's privacy revelation problem, we model the negotiation process as a Bayesian game where the service provider faces different types of users. Finally an extension to P3P is proposed that allows a simple expression and implementation of negotiation processes. Support for this extension has been integrated in the Mozilla browser.

Consumer Privacy and Product Steering versus Price Discrimination in the Online Market

The following master thesis aims to study consumer privacy, where I focus on price discrimination and steering in the online market. I look closer at whether consumers will benefit from revealing their preferences or not to the seller. The consumer will need to consider the benefits of more accurate recommendations and possible consequences of higher product prices. My topic question is as follows: Will consumers benefit from voluntarily disclosing their information to the seller? I present two models by Hidir and Vellodi (2021) and Ichihashi (2020), to help find answers to the topic question. The models study the price implications of consumers’ privacy and welfare in the online market. Hidir and Vellodi (2021) focus on price discrimination and introduce incentive-compatible market segmentation. To ensure trade over relevant products, Hidir and Vellodi (2021) state that the consumer needs to partially reveal their information with pooling segments wide enough to keep the prices low and narrow enough to get trade with relevant products. Ichihashi (2020), with a focus on steering, studies a multi-product seller either with a commitment or no-commitment pricing regimes. A consumer discloses information to the seller, which learns the consumer’s preferences, sets prices, and makes product recommendations.MasteroppgaveECON391MASV-SØKPROF-SØ

Marketing management of a successful e-business

Marketing management occupies an increasingly important position in the business world, as well as in the sphere of electronic commerce. Some participants, however, underestimate the importance of this marketing support, which may be one of the major causes of the failure and inability of some companies operating on the Internet to grow. The aim of this paper is to develop an effective marketing management process model, which can significantly contribute to the increased competitiveness of companies operating on the Internet. The validity of this model is then applied on a Czech e-shop, which has long been one of the leaders of the Czech Internet market. To achieve the objective of this paper the current situation will be analysed, and synthesis of the findings from research literature as well as modelling using the methods of abstraction and specification will be performed. This article is focused on Czech Internet market. Results of the survey (case study) will be used for further research in the field of e-business

Electronic government procurement adoption behavior amongst Malaysian SMEs

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between a model of electronic procurement (e-procurement) adoption behavior and the level of Government e-procurement adoption amongst Small Medium Enterprise (SME) in Malaysia. Data was collected through questionnaires that were distributed to SME selected randomly in all SME in Malaysia.The data were analyzed using factor analysis, reliability analysis, independent-sample t-test, descriptive statistics, Pearson Correlation and multiple regressions. Regression results reveals that ‘power’, ‘trust’ and ‘value’ have a positive relationship with the level of e-procurement adoption amongst SME in Malaysia.All dimensions, namely; the power of supplier, power of procurement, trust on supplier, trust on information technology, value of implementation system efficiency and value of cost efficiency were also correlated with the level of e-procurement adoption amongst SME. Past studies on e-procurement are beset by problems of buyer-seller relationship perspective.In addition, these studies are skewed towards Government-SME relationship perspective which the Government possesses more power than SME and provide a better incentive to educate and influence SME to adopt e-procurement.In investigation the relationship between a model of e-procurement adoption behavior and the level of Government e-procurement adoption amongst SME in Malaysia, this study also tries to provides recommendation to Malaysian government for improving the level of e-procurement adoption amongst SME

Tasks for Agent-Based Negotiation Teams:Analysis, Review, and Challenges

An agent-based negotiation team is a group of interdependent agents that join together as a single negotiation party due to their shared interests in the negotiation at hand. The reasons to employ an agent-based negotiation team may vary: (i) more computation and parallelization capabilities, (ii) unite agents with different expertise and skills whose joint work makes it possible to tackle complex negotiation domains, (iii) the necessity to represent different stakeholders or different preferences in the same party (e.g., organizations, countries, and married couple). The topic of agent-based negotiation teams has been recently introduced in multi-agent research. Therefore, it is necessary to identify good practices, challenges, and related research that may help in advancing the state-of-the-art in agent-based negotiation teams. For that reason, in this article we review the tasks to be carried out by agent-based negotiation teams. Each task is analyzed and related with current advances in different research areas. The analysis aims to identify special challenges that may arise due to the particularities of agent-based negotiation teams.Comment: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 201

Hello Barbie: First They Will Monitor You, Then They Will Discriminate Against You. Perfectly.

This Article argues that the evolution of software—and the looming age of the “Internet of Things”—will allow manufacturers to make use of consumer monitoring technologies and restrictive software licenses to price discriminate more perfectly. First, the increasing communication between software and its producers gives more opportunities to monitor consumer behavior and characteristics. Second, attaching restrictive copyright licenses to software—and to goods containing software—enables producers to restrict use and resale of their products. By combining monitoring and restrictive licensing, producers will have increasingly better ability and opportunities to price discriminate among their consumers. This Article explains that increased monitoring and price discrimination will not always happen because, in some cases, it will be against the manufacturers’ financial interests. But in other cases, manufacturers will indeed restrict use of products to facilitate price discrimination. The Article argues that the low marginal cost of distribution of software makes it more likely that price discrimination of software-enabled goods will be welfare enhancing and will result in cross-subsidization from rich to poor so that poor consumers can get more products for lower prices. The Article also demonstrates that the traditional policy reasons to disallow restraints on personal property do not apply to software-enabled devices. We conclude that rather than discouraging the use of restrictive software licenses, the law should adapt to better facilitate such licenses and the more perfect price discrimination that goes with them