IRI-9509914 Whinston, Andrew University of Texas-Austin $73,475 - 12 mos Economic Issues for Electronic Commerce This research is to study issues of electronic commerce, focusing on electronic data interchange, advertising, and virtual stores. The main objective is to provide a general approach to manage and analyze the potential economy consisting of users of the network services and the service providers, leading to an implementable pricing tool for communications networks. The first phase will enhance the existing simulation models by developing additional mechanisms for providing better predictions of waiting times. These additional mechanisms include: (1) approximating queuing mechanisms for computing prices, (2) developing guidelines to set parameters automatically, (3) adding functionality to simulation subroutines, (4) automating some sampling subroutines, (5) performing testing, (6) developing computing tools for the pricing scheme. The second phase will implement pricing mechanism on LANs and building a simple user interface with the ability to query, optimize costs, and present results in an appropriate format. At the server level, software agents will be developed to respond to user queries and perform estimation and pricing calculations. The third and final phase of the project intends to develop the complete final priority pricing mechanism for the Wide Area Network environments.
