This book provides an analysis of the impact on underpricing and long-term performance of venture capital in IPOs, and of the ownership characteristics of venture capital companies. It investigates the performance of IPOs in Korea during the dot-com bubble-and-bust period. The book looks at venture capital firms and their participation, their reputation, and conflicts of interests, particularly in the context of the development of a new secondary stock market in an emerging market and these factors affect the pricing and performance effects of IPO firms. This book is a useful reference to those interested in promoting an active KOSDAQ type of stock market, and understanding how venture capitalists and their institutional affiliation may reduce information asymmetry and add value of IPO firms.

This book provides an analysis of the impact on underpricing and long-term performance of venture capital in IPOs, and of the ownership characteristics of venture capital companies. It investigates the performance of IPOs in Korea during the dot-com bubble-and-bust period. The book looks at venture capital firms and their participation, their reputation, and conflicts of interests, particularly in the context of the development of a new secondary stock market in an emerging market and these factors affect the pricing and performance effects of IPO firms. This book is a useful reference to those interested in promoting an active KOSDAQ type of stock market, and understanding how venture capitalists and their institutional affiliation may reduce information asymmetry and add value of IPO firms.

Five years ago, with excitement and uncertainty, we witnessed the birth of PRIMA (Paci?c Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents). The ?rst PRIMA in 1998 has now grown into PRIMA 2003, the 6th Paci?c Rim Inter- tional Workshop on Multi-Agents in Seoul, Korea. During a period of ?ve years, the notion of agent research has grown so much that we hear the term agent on a daily basis. Various ?elds such as business, the Web, software engineering, on-line games and such are now using the term agent as a placeholder, just like the term object is used in the object-oriented paradigm. On the other hand, the research area has extended toward real applications, such as the Semantic Web and ubiquitous computing. The themes of PRIMA 2003 re?ected the following trends: - agent-based electronic commerce, auctions and markets - agent architectures and their applications - agent communication languages, dialog and interaction protocols - agent ontologies - agent programming languages, frameworks and toolkits - agentcities - agents and grid computing - agents and peer computing -agentsandtheSemanticWeb - agents and Web services - arti?cial social systems - con?ict resolution and negotiation - evaluation of multi-agent systems - languages and techniques for describing (multi-)agent systems - meta modeling and meta reasoning - multi-agent planning and learning - multi-agent systems and their applications - social reasoning, agent modeling, and organization - standards for agents and multi-agent systems - teams and coalitions - ubiquitous agents

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Pacific Rim International Conference on Multi-Agents, PRIMA 2002, held in Tokyo, Japan in August 2002.The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The book offers topical sections on architectures, models, and mechanisms; coordination, negotiation, and organization; agent-based inter faces; and applications.