Multilateral Communication Research Articles

Sequential selling mechanisms

In this paper we attempt to formalize the idea that a mechanism that involves multilateral communication between buyers and sellers may be dominated by one that involves simple bilateral communication. To do this we consider the well known problem in which a seller tries to sell a single unit of output to a group ofN buyers who have independently distributed private valuations. Our arguments hinge on two considerations. First, buyers communicate their willingness to negotiate with the seller sequentially, and second, buyers have the option of purchasing the good from some alternative supplier. It is shown that the seller cannot improve upon a procedure in which she offers the good to each buyer in turn at a fixed price. The seller reverts to multilateral communication if possible, only when no buyer is willing to pay the fixed price. In reasonable environments buyers will be too impatient to wait for the outcome of a multilateral negotiation and all communications will be bilateral.

Common language for multilateral communication between different CADCAM drawing databases

A new method is presented for exchanging drawing-data between different models of a CADCAM database. This method provides a neutral and semantic language for the description of all kinds of drawing models. This language gives a model that is common to different existing models. The data of the common model, when restated by one of the preprocessors, can facilitate the translation by multiple postprocessors of a counterpart of the original data without substantial data integrity loss. To obtain high reusability of data, substantial differences between the common model and each of the other models can be reasonably adjusted by a user-controlled translator. This method has been proved to be sufficiently practical and efficient to realize multilateral communication.

LANGUAGE CONSTRAINTS TO WATER RESOURCE UTILIZATION1

ABSTRACT: Worldwide development of water resources and control of pollution would be improved by the ability for direct, multilateral communication between workers in the dozens of different language communities involved. Current language‐based problems which should be eliminated include (1) incomplete diffusion of scientific knowledge, (2) technical inbreeding, (3) unsatisfactory international conferences, (4) money wasted on translation, and (5) unstandardized technical terminology. General education in a common second language for international use can eliminate these conditions. Ethnic languages are not qualified for this purpose, because of their national biases and extreme learning difficulties. The Esperanto language is free of these limitations, and its application is recommended as a means for improving the overall performance of the industry.