Small Number Of Buyers Research Articles

Digital Marketing Practices Adopted by Agricultural Service Companies in India

All of the services required to transport a farm product from the farm to the consumer are generally considered to be part of agriculture marketing. Over the past 60 years, there have been many changes to the agriculture marketing system as a result of an increase in marketed surplus, higher urbanisation and income levels, corresponding changes in the structure of demand for marketing services, as well as increased connections with distant and foreign markets. Reduced marketing expenses are the main objective of agricultural marketing. E-Agriculture or e-Agribusiness refers to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in the agricultural sector. e-Agribusiness. Every aspect of the agri-food chain will be affected by digitalization, but it will necessitate big changes in farming, rural economics, and produce marketing. Farmers gain from ICT use in agriculture since it enables them to learn about the market and sell their products. In the digital era, the whole agriculture industry may be transformed. ICT assists small farmers in locating various purchasers for producers ready to pay a premium. Small business owners deal with a small number of buyers who either pick up from them or pay them directly. Market distortions can be reduced by using a mobile application that provides price information to farmers. M- farm mobile application are used globally in Kenya enable sales collective by allowing users to locate farmers, input dealers, purchasers, and storage warehouses. Farmers are obtaining better market prices, according to the research. Farmers in China's agriculture industries traditional plan their crop depending on previous season's sales. Farmers now have access to consumer sales data through Alibaba's flash sale and marketing platform "Juhuasuan" and its virtual farming feature "Jutudi" so they can more precisely plan crops based on recent consumer patterns. It allows customers to order agricultural products in advance of harvest. To avoid middlemen, it works directly with cooperatives and farmers. The government of Tamil Nādu offers the Uzhavan app for marketing products as one of the services it provides, as well as many other digital apps from other state governments to notify farmers about timely and accurate agricultural production and market information. This article provides an overview of current digital agriculture marketing services.

Contract design in agriculture supply chains with random yield

Abstract In an agricultural setting it is natural to consider yield risk in the context of a three level supply chain: with a small number of suppliers, large numbers of growers, and a small number of buyers. In the cereal growing case that is our focus, there is a supplier of fertiliser, a potentially large number of growers of cereal crops and a buyer, who purchases grain from the growers. The yield depends both on the input level of fertiliser and also on random weather-related factors. We study the impact of a new type of contract structure in which the grower purchases inputs at a discount, but agrees to a reduced price for the crop. The buyer makes a payment to the supplier to compensate for the discount offered. We show how this can coordinate the supply chain and demonstrate the potential advantages of this contract form when producers are risk averse. We look in detail at the implications of the use of these contracts by Australian wheat growers using data generated by APSIM, a growth simulation tool, to understand the connection between yields, fertiliser use and the weather. By using APSIM we can estimate the distribution of yields implied by the grower’s decision on fertiliser application and hence estimate optimal fertiliser use for risk averse growers.

Multiple equilibria in a monopoly market with heterogeneous agents and externalities

We explore the effects of social influence in a simple market model in which a large number of agents face a binary choice: to buy/not to buy a single unit of a product at a price posted by a single seller (monopoly market). We consider the case of positive externalities: an agent is more willing to buy if other agents make the same decision. We consider two special cases of heterogeneity in the individuals' decision rules, corresponding in the literature to the Random Utility Models of Thurstone, and of McFadden and Manski. In the first one the heterogeneity fluctuates with time, leading to a standard model in Physics: the Ising model at finite temperature (known as annealed disorder) in a uniform external field. In the second approach the heterogeneity among agents is fixed; in Physics this is a particular case of the quenched disorder model known as a random field Ising model, at zero temperature. We study analytically the equilibrium properties of the market in the limiting case where each agent is influenced by all the others (the mean field limit), and we illustrate some dynamic properties of these models making use of numerical simulations in an Agent based Computational Economics approach. Considering the optimization of the profit by the seller within the case of fixed heterogeneity with global externality, we exhibit a new regime where, if the mean willingness to pay increases and/or the production costs decrease, the seller's optimal strategy jumps from a solution with a high price and a small number of buyers, to another one with a low price and a large number of buyers. This regime, usually modelled with ad hoc bimodal distributions of the idiosyncratic heterogeneity, arises here for general monomodal distributions if the social influence is strong enough.

Seller's dilemma due to social interactions between customers

In this paper, we consider a discrete choice model where heterogeneous agents are subject to mutual influences. We explore some consequences on the market's behaviour, in the simplest case of a uniform willingness to pay distribution. We exhibit a first-order phase transition in the profit optimization by the monopolist: if the social influence is strong enough, there is a regime where, if the mean willingness to pay increases, or if the production costs decrease, the optimal solution for the monopolist jumps from a solution with a high price and a small number of buyers, to a solution with a low price and a large number of buyers. Depending on the path of prices adjustments by the monopolist, simulations show hysteretic effects on the fraction of buyers.

Collusion-secure and cost-effective detection of unlawful multimedia redistribution

Intellectual property protection of multimedia content is essential to the successful deployment of Internet content delivery platforms. There are two general approaches to multimedia copy protection: copy prevention and copy detection. Past experience shows that only copy detection based on mark embedding techniques looks promising. Multimedia fingerprinting means embedding a different buyer-identifying mark in each copy of the multimedia content being sold. Fingerprinting is subject to collusion attacks: a coalition of buyers collude and follow some strategy to mix their copies with the aim of obtaining a mixture from which none of their identifying marks can be retrieved; if their strategy is successful, the colluders can redistribute the mixture with impunity. A construction is presented in this paper to obtain fingerprinting codes for copyright protection which survive any collusion strategy involving up to three buyers (3-security). It is shown that the proposed scheme achieves 3-security with a codeword length dramatically shorter than the one required by the general Boneh-Shaw construction. Thus the proposed fingerprints require much less embedding capacity. Due to their own clandestine nature, collusions tend to involve a small number of buyers, so that there is plenty of use for codes providing cost-effective protection against collusions of size up to three.

Opening the Black Box of the White Cube: a survey of French contemporary art galleries at the turn of the millenium

This paper is based on the findings of a study carried out for the French Ministry of Culture on the economics of contemporary art galleries. The study was conducted in 1998 and concerned the whole set of art galleries in Paris, and also a sample of galleries in other locations in France and in four foreign countries (the USA, the UK, Switzerland, and Germany). The survey included quantitative and qualitative data. The paper emphasizes the organizational characteristics of the Parisian galleries. It stresses their financial weakness. Galleries are particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the market and they generally depend on a small number of buyers. The paper also shows that economic performance is not linked to aesthetic choices.

Markets Versus Negotiations: The Emergence of Centralized Markets

We study the incentives of privately informed traders who have access to two forms of trade: direct negotiations with a small number of buyers and sellers (or decentralized trade), and centralized markets with a relatively large number of buyers and sellers. We show that weak trader types (that is, buyers with a high willingness to pay and sellers with low costs) will prefer to trade through centralized markets. This leads to a complete unraveling of direct negotiations, so that ultimately, all serious buyers and sellers opt for trading through the centralized market. Once this happens, no trader can profitably trade through direct negotiations.

Durability in a Monopoly With a Small Number of Buyers

This paper shows that the number of buyers is a crucial demand characteristic for a monopolist's choice of durability. When he sells to a few large buyers, he offers a more durable good than when selling to many small buyers. By increasing durability of the good sold to large buyers, the monopolist encourages current purchasing and can thus engage in greater intertemporal price discrimination and make more profit. Therefore Bulow's proposition of minimal durability does not survive in the case of few buyers. This has not been pointed out thus far.

Game theory in marketing science uses and limitations

This paper reviews some major concepts in game theory and indicates how they may apply to marketing science. The theory of games provides a framework for addressing problems of competitive strategies and of buyer-seller interactions. These issues are important in studying industrial markets where there are a small number of buyers as well as for studying how to incorporate knowledgeable, active competitors into consumer marketing mix models. Few marketers have seen much benefit in the past from developments in game theory. This is partly because of the historical preoccupation of game theorists with complete information, zero sum games. The richer area of games of incomplete information may have much more to offer the marketing scientist. In this paper we review how game-theoretic approaches (interactive models) differ from most previous approaches, which are optimizing and asymmetric. We then look at how these alternative approaches apply to two problem areas - competitive entry and bargaining. Then we review potential applications of game theory in marketing and the value of applying marketing science approaches in game theory. We conclude with a perspective on future developments in this field.

Bundling Decisions by a Multiproduct Monopolist with Incomplete Information

This paper analyzes bundling decisions of a rnultiproduct monopolist facing uncertain demand. The monopolist sells his products using an auction mechanism and the market is analyzed as a game with incomplete information in which the buyers as well as the seller are strategic agents. With a small number of buyers, a profit maximizing seller will bundle all his output. This makes buyers uniformly worse off compared to the case where the same monopolist does not bundle, in the sense that any buyer is worse off regardless of his demand for the monopolist's outputs. With a larger number of buyers, the seller will have a tendency to unbundle his output and high-demand buyers are worse off than they would be if the monopolist bundled his output. Low-demand buyers. on the other hand. are always better off when the monopolist unbundles his output, regardless of the number of competing buyers. Despite the fact that high demand buyers are the typical purchasers of the monopolist's output, the net effect of increasing the number of buyers is greater market efficiency since bundling creates market inefficiencies both ex post and ex ante.