It is becoming increasingly evident that in the future the Internet will host large numbers of software agents that aid or even act on behalf of companies and consumers to make decisions and carry out transactions. In this paper, we develop different pricing and ordering strategies with limited information requirements for e-retailers under the electronic business environment, and study the dynamics and performance of these strategies through multi-agent simulation. The results not only reproduce some phenomena in former literature, such as the "tacit collusion" and the cyclical price wars,but also generate new findings, for example, the "tacit collusion" does not always exist among hill-climbing e-retailers, and the cyclical price wars will be suppressed when e-retailers consider their competitors'strategies. The results show that in electronic business environments, to test different strategies and evaluate their performance by simulation before they are employed into practice is of great importance.
This paper is based on four in-depth case studies on the information and communication technology (ICT) evolution of Chinese tobacco companies. The ICT transformation processes of these companies are introduced briefly. A strategic grid model was used, which shows that depending on a company's strategic grid cell, different behavior patterns can be observed, in terms of Nolan's stage model. The analysis shows that companies allocated in the "turnaround" and "strategic" cell do not behave accordingly to Nolan's stage model. A few years after China first application for a World Trade Organization (WTO) membership renewal in 1986, observed companies skipped some of Nolan's stages to achieve an accelerated ICT transformation. Therefore, a fast transformation of ICT plays a major role for Chinese tobacco companies to face the challenges entailed by an open door policy and the WTO entry. This conclusion is limited to companies that are allocated either in the "transformation" cell or the "strategic" cell.
