International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making

We present a brief discussion on the impact of information technology on problems from finance and economics. Then, an overview is given upon the papers that are included in the special issue.

Shill bidding has increased substantially with the explosion in the number of online auctions. For English auctions with conventional intermediation fee schedules and a continuous increment of the bid, sellers may profit from shill bidding, which is illegal. To deter shill bidding, Wang et al.³¹ designed a mechanism — the shill-deterrent fee schedule (SDFS) which makes shill bidding unprofitable. This paper analyzes the feasibility of applying SDFS rules to both single round and multi-round English auctions in a framework of independent private value (IPV) with a random number of bidders. It is shown that most of the results in Wang et al.³¹ remain true at our cases. In addition, we also propose an approach for sellers to reset the subsequent reserves in multi-round English auctions.

Competing in today's environment is to compete between supply chains. Organizations strive for lower costs and respond rapidly to changes in the market. E-supply chain is one of the current approaches for achieving competitive advantages. Panta et al., developed a framework of evaluating e-supply chain implementation strategies for a free market economy with two factors.²⁴ However, implementing e-supply chains in a transitional economy is subject to additional constraints in comparison with a free market economy. Information asymmetry and government influence are the two distinguished factors on the e-supply chain implementation strategies in transitional economy. This paper extends the framework of e-supply chain implementation strategies to include the above two factors. This new framework divides the whole problem space into seven cases. An implementation strategy is proposed for each case.

A critical problem in finance engineering is to value the option and other derivatives securities correctly. The Monte Carlo method (MC) is an important one in the computation for the valuation of multi-asset European option. But its convergence rate is very slow. So various quasi Monte Carlo methods and the relative parallel computing method are becoming an important approach to the valuing of multi-asset European option. In this paper, we use a number-theoretic method, which is a H–W method, to generate identical distributed point set in order to compute the value of the multi-asset European option. It turns out to be very effective, and the time of computing is greatly shortened. Comparing with other methods, the method computes less points and it is especially suitable for high dimension problem.

This paper reports numerical examples for a 3 individual 2 good CES/LES pure exchange economy in which 5 equilibria exist. We explore the size of the regions of the parameter space for which 5 equilibria persist, and show these ranges to be very small in each parameter. Other features of the equilibrium manifolds are examined. The number of equilibria can jump from 5 to 3 to 1, or even from 5 to 1. We also find changes of (Kehoe) equilibrium indices from -1 to +1 or from +1 to -1. Then, we provide parameter changes simultaneously in a large range that preserve given 5 equilibria.

Let a set of players be given and suppose that players have strict preferences over other players. The preferences are then extended to preferences over sets using the best (worst) player of a set and the worst (best) player as a tie-breaker. For such set-preferences we study the structure and computational questions connected with the existence problem of stable partitions. In the end, we review the known results for stable partitions under various preferences and point out some open questions.

Social choice theory is the study of decision theory on how to aggregate separate preferences into group's rational preference. It has wide applications, especially on the design of voting rules, and brings far-reaching influence on the development of modern political science and welfare economics. With the advent of the information age, social choice theory finds its up-to-date application on designing effective Metasearch engines. Metasearch engines provide effective searching by combining the results of multiple source search engines that make use of diverse models and techniques. In this work, we analyze social choice algorithms in a graph-theoretic approach. In addition to classical social choice algorithms, such as Borda and Condorcet, we study one special type of social choice algorithms, elimination voting, to tackle Metasearch problem. Some new algorithms are proposed and examined in the fusion experiment on TREC data. It shows that these elimination voting algorithms achieve satisfied performance when compared with Borda algorithm.

Behavior analysis of credit cardholders is one of the main research topics in credit card portfolio management. Usually, the cardholder's behavior, especially bankruptcy, is measured by a score of aggregate attributes that describe cardholder's spending history. In real-life practice, statistics and neural networks are the major players to calculate such a score system for prediction. Recently, various multiple linear programming-based classification methods have been promoted for analyzing credit cardholders' behaviors. As a continuation of this research direction, this paper proposes a heuristic classification method by using the fuzzy linear programming (FLP) to discover the bankruptcy patterns of credit cardholders. Instead of identifying a compromise solution for the separation of credit cardholder behaviors, this approach classifies the credit cardholder behaviors by seeking a fuzzy (satisfying) solution obtained from a fuzzy linear program. In this paper, a real-life credit database from a major US bank is used for empirical study which is compared with the results of known multiple linear programming approaches.

The extensible, structural and validated nature of XML provides standard data representation for efficient data interchange among diverse information resources available on the Web. Therefore, it leads to its growing recognition in e-commerce and Internet-based information exchange. In this paper, we stress the adoption of XML technology in developing efficient and flexible Web-enabled decision support systems. Based on a case study for portfolio selection systems, we explore the design issues in applying XML to overcome the heterogeneity of data exchange and sharing of various portfolio optimization models.

When distance learning becomes more and more popular, prodding the students into high and constant motivation has been an interesting research issue these years. In this paper, we introduce a Web-based learning system which provides a dynamic interaction environment for the students to share their information with each other. The system aims to make the distance learning program a fascinating game allowing students to get their scores and ranking interactively.

Blind signatures play a critical role in digital cash systems. In this paper, we investigate the blind signature functionality in the framework of universally composable (UC) security — the strongest security guarantees up to now for cryptographic protocols over the Internet. We present the universally composable blind signature functionality, . Our approach is based on a new UC signature functionality , which is a modified version of the original signature functionality presented by Canetti. We also prove that and are actually equivalent with respect to non-adaptive adversaries. Our result is of both theoretical and practical consequence to future research studies and practical implementations of digital cash systems with universally composable security.