Research equipments in China were heavily underutilized. An e-business market was created to allow students to reserve available equipment service time from different universities; however, low trading success rate has been the bottleneck of the market efficiency. A third-party subsidy program is being considered to encourage equipment service providers (sellers) to lower their asking prices; hence it should improve the trading success rate. For varies reasons, most e-business markets have higher than usual price dispersion problems. Third-party subsidy program will not be as effective towards high price dispersal markets. Experimental results confirm that subsidy will provide little improvement towards the overall trading success rate, within a market with high price dispersion problem.

Describes an experimental exploration in Internet-based control of robots. The motivation of this work is that Internet communications can be exploited to achieve greater productivity from machines with local intelligence. Local intelligent systems contact human experts to solicit advice when a problem facing the machine is beyond its cognitive capabilities. This topic is explored in the context of a robot performing a sample domestic task (sorting laundry). An experimental system was constructed that has limited autonomous competence, but which proved to be significantly more productive through the use of occasional Internet-based human supervision.