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Market-oriented programming is a new approach to design and implementation of resource allocation mechanisms in computer systems [1]. It has its roots in different disciplines, such as economics and computer science, in particular the area of multi-agent systems. There are our previous researches to apply market-oriented programming into resource allocation problems [2,3]. And the Pareto optimality in market-oriented programming was left into microeconomics, and never tried to be proved in these approaches using multi-agent programming. In this paper we construct a Walrasian type virtual market, that is a principal market model in microeconomics, and try to confirm the Pareto optimality in our market model by comparing the solutions with a conventional analytic approach, named fixed-point algorithm.

There have been very few direct applications of experimental techniques in macroeconomics for two main reasons. First, macroeconomics is about the interaction between markets, and it is not easy to design an elegant treatment that gets at the essence of how a national economy functions. Second, there is a vestigial prejudice that favors econometrics over putatively unorthodox empirical approaches. Still, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward Prescott is alleged to have said, “Don’t regress; progress!”

Theorists and market traders have strikingly different views about financial markets. [5] Standard theory assumes identical investors who share their rational expectations about an asset’s future price. Consequently, speculation cannot be profitable, except by luck; trading volume stays low, and market bubbles and crashes reflect rational changes in the asset’s valuation. In contrast, traders do speculate in practice. Also, market deviations exist and are often ascribed to market psychology. There is also an interpretation of these differences at the level of practical trading rules. If speculation works, technical rules that are based on only price or trade volume information may be useful. According to rational expectations theory, however, only fundamental strategies that relate price to fundamental value by using dividend information will yield success.

The audit fees have been recently at issue in Japan. They are too low compared with other developed countries and bring Japanese audit firms to financial difficulties. Despite of concerns, most public companies in Japan give the cold shoulder, since they want to spare any cost other than operating ones. Some people fear that this may compromise the credibility of auditing in Japan. The aim of this paper is to examine how the different audit fees influence the behavior of investors and managers.

Regulating a natural monopoly market has always remained a source of concern. The problem arises because of the decreasing average cost structure in the market. Ideally, only one firm serving the whole market demand is the efficient solution to avoid any cost duplication. However, when there is a single unregulated firm serving a market it brings up the standard monopoly price-gouging problem. Many utility services share the characteristics of a natural monopoly. As a result, almost all countries in their deregulation phases are concerned with the efficient running of such markets. Restraining monopoly behavior effectively in a natural monopoly market remains a much-debated issue. The idea of creating a “contestable” environment has influenced USA, UK and many other countries during their deregulation phase. In a perfectly contestable market the threat of hit-and-run entry by new entrants in the monopoly market can provide the right disciplining stick for the monopolist incumbent to charge a price equal to the average cost of production (the Ramsey optimal price). This outcome is described as a contestable (market) outcome.

This paper describes how people play a zero sum game with different private information. Apparently more informed players earn more than less informed players do. What happens however if people buy and sell speculatively in the future market? Those who are better informed seem to have greater chance to earn money, while those who have no information may expect zero profit because they seem to have equal chance to make money (to buy a commodity whose price will increase or to sell a commodity whose price will decrease) and to lose money (to sell a commodity whose price will increase or to buy a commodity whose price will decrease). Yet the sum of all traders is zero. If the most informed player earns profit and the lest informed player expects zero profit, some modestly informed players must suffer loss.

A middleman is important; he/she purchases goods from suppliers for resale, creates and manages markets, seeks out suppliers, finds and encourages buyers, selects bid and ask prices, and holds inventories to provide liquidity or make services and goods available. However, economic theories such as the general equilibrium theory have not examined the role of a middleman.

The literature on the relation between a trader’s information about the traded assets and the trader’s returns from trading has, so far, mainly concentrated on evaluating the value of insider information. Several papers have shown that insider information leads to returns far above the market average (see, e.g., Jeng et.al. [2], Lin and Howe [5], Lakonishok and Lee [4], Krahnen et.al. [3]). Much less effort has been invested into the question whether the level of information has also a significantly positive impact on the returns from trading when average informed traders are compared to traders with little or almost no information. There is some evidence that managers of small or large investment funds systematically underperform the market (see, e.g., Cowles [1], Malkiel [6][7]), which might be taken as evidence that rather well informed traders (without insider information, though) do not beat the market average. However, whether having no information might lead to better trading performance has not been addressed systematically, so far. In this study we will address the relation between a trader’s information level and his returns from trading in an experimental asset market where we can control carefully for a trader’s information level about the traded assets. Our results suggest that having more information need not lead to higher returns, except for the very best informed traders.

Given its lower costs relative to litigation, arbitration is rapidly increasing as a mechanism to settle disputes. While it has traditionally been employed in labor disputes, arbitration has several characteristics that are making it an increasingly attractive option in numerous forms of dispute. First, relative to traditional litigation, arbitration is significantly less costly. However, in addition to the lower expense, arbitration generally places greater restrictions on discovery thereby lessening the competitive information that a business may have to reveal in the resolution of a dispute. Further, these limitations tend to hasten the process further reducing both direct and indirect costs. As mentioned by Fuller [9], Apple Computer saved over $4 million in legal fees by using arbitration in a case with the IRS and simultaneously prevented the revelation of proprietary information which would have occurred in standard litigation. As a result of these characteristics, arbitration has become the dispute resolution of choice for numerous business transactions.