Large-Scale, Long-Term and Virtual Experimental Environments for Electronic Markets

虽然互联网经济正在迅速增长，但对这一新领域的关键业务问题却知之甚少。新兴的电子商务理论和组织电子商务是基于实体经济。然而，有关模型和假设测试的文献很少，主要是由于难以收集相关的实地数据。实地实验可以为电子市场提供有价值的见解，并可以成为实验经济学学科的有力补充。主要研究人员开发了实验数字经济（EDE），这是一种用于创建长期虚拟电子市场的广泛技术环境。真实的数字商品通过EDE生产和交易，并由基于真实的激励的代理人消费。它使命题和假设的测试产生的基于经济学的竞争和消费者行为在电子市场中的建模，也可以导致系统的发现。先前的EDE实验已经导致了关于成功商业策略的见解（例如，大规模定制、销售形式等）和过程（例如，客户服务，协调）的数字产品公司。拟议的研究将探讨各种市场机制的有效性（例如，公布价格和拍卖系统、基于中介的认证和建立信誉等）信息和软件产品。

While the Internet economy is growing rapidly, little is systematically known or understood regarding key business issues in this new domain. Emerging theories of electronic commerce and organizing electronic business are based on the physical economy. However, the literature on testing of related models and assumptions is sparse, primarily due to difficulties in collecting relevant field data. Field experimentation can provide valuable insights into electronic markets and can be a strong complement to the experimental economics discipline. The principal investigators have developed Experimental Digital Economy (EDE), an extensive technological environment for creating a long-term virtual electronic market. Real digital goods are produced and traded through EDE and consumed by agents based on real incentives. It enables the testing of propositions and hypotheses generated from economics based modeling of competition and consumer behavior in an electronic market, and can also lead to systematic discoveries. Prior experiments with EDE have led to insights regarding successful business strategies (e.g., mass customization, selling format, etc.) and processes (e.g., customer care, coordination) for digital products companies. The proposed research will explore the effectiveness of various market mechanisms (e.g., posted prices and auction systems, intermediary-based certification and reputation building, etc.) for information and software goods.