The Market for Video on Demand

In spite of predictions to the contrary, video on demand service has yet to become a significant channel for distribution of audiovisual entertainment to consumers’ homes. In this paper, we examine the market for video on demand service under the assumption that quality of service is a threshold factor that consumers take into consideration when making their purchasing decision. Given this characteristic of consumer behavior, we model the joint demand for video on demand service and broadband network access. We then proceed to characterize the optimal solution to monopolist and duopolist content providers’ price and quantity decisions in this market. The comparative statics results are extended in a two-period game theoretic framework that addresses the timing issue of service adoption.     

A study of mobile internet user’s service quality perceptions from a user’s utilitarian and hedonic value tendency perspectives

Although a few studies have focused on mobile value from the distinctive feature of a mobile technology perspective, limited attempts have been made from a mobile user’s value tendency perspective. In this study, building upon prior research on productivity-oriented and pleasure-oriented nature of systems, we categorize mobile values as having utilitarian and hedonic use. Based on these two values, we conceptualize types of tendency of mobile users’ application use namely utilitarian tendency and hedonic tendency. The goal of this study is to examine the relationships between mobile consumers’ value tendency and their perceptions of mobile Internet service quality in terms of three different mobile quality dimensions (i.e., connection quality, design quality, and information quality). In addition, drawing upon the “digital divide” literature, the relationships between mobile users’ personal dispositions (i.e., maturity and socio-economic status) and their mobile value tendency are also tested. The empirical results of the study, the interpretation of the results, research contributions, and limitations are discussed.     

Exploring factors influencing consumers’ behavioral intention to adopt broadband in Malaysia

The purpose of this paper is to examine various normative, attitudinal and control factors influencing consumers’ intention to adopt broadband internet in a developing country such as Malaysia. This study is based on empirical data collected using a self-administered questionnaire relating to the normative, attitudinal and control variables. Structural equation modeling analysis is conducted to test the role of numerous variables on consumers’ behavioral intentions to adopt broadband internet in Malaysia. Results revealed that Primary Influences (PI), Relative Advantage (RA), Hedonic Outcomes (HO), Facilitating Conditions Resources (FCR), and Self-Efficacy (SE) are positively associated with consumers’ Behavioral Intention (BI) to adopt broadband in Malaysia. The significance of this research study is twofold. Practically, this research study provide some useful guidelines to industry players, be it the internet service providers (ISPs) or the policy makers, to understand which are the factors (primary influences, self-efficacy, relative advantage, hedonic outcomes and facilitating conditions resources) that can have an influence on consumers’ intention to adopt broadband technology. It was found that primary influences, self-efficacy and relative advantage are the key determinants that influences consumers’ broadband adoption. From here, practitioners could take into consideration our findings when revising and restructuring their marketing strategy. Theoretically, the research framework used in this study is an extension from the past research models used (i.e. TPB, DOI and MATH). With the newly integrated framework, a greater level of comprehension can be attained with regards to the broadband acceptance among the Malaysian consumers.     

Automating user reviews using ontologies: an agent-based approach

The Web is becoming a global market place, where the same services and products are offered by different providers. When obtaining a service, consumers have to select one provider among many alternatives to receive a service or buy a product. In real life, when obtaining a service, many consumers depend on the user reviews. User reviews—presumably written by other consumers—provide details on the consumers’ experiences and thus are more informative than ratings. The down side is that such user reviews are written in natural language, making it extremely difficult to be interpreted by computers. Therefore, current technologies do not allow automation of user reviews and require too much human effort for tasks such as writing and reading reviews for the providers, aggregating existing information, and finally choosing among the possible candidates. In this paper, we represent consumers’ reviews as machine processable structures using ontologies and develop a layered multiagent framework to enable consumers to find satisfactory service providers for their needs automatically. The framework can still function successfully when consumers evolve their language and when deceptive reviewers enter the system. We show the flexibility of the framework by employing different algorithms for various tasks and evaluate them for different circumstances.     

Mining purchasing decision rules from service encounter data of retail chain stores

In this explorative research, we aim to find the most important service experience variables that determine customer purchasing decision and the clerks’ influence on customers’ purchases. This study was conducted as a case study of a children’s apparel company, denoted Company L, which has 243 retail stores. Company L has implemented Point of Sale (POS) systems in its retail stores, and would like to know what functions could be added to induce storefront employees to deliver better customer service. We, therefore, focus on observing the services provided by storefront employees and their reflection on a customer’s purchasing decision in a retail store. The study generated decision trees via Weka, a data mining open source software platform, to analyze multiple data sources to (1) understand what makes a good service experience for a customer, (2) get explicit knowledge from service encounter information, and (3) externalize the tacit knowledge of storefront service experiences. These findings can be used to improve Company L’s POS system to guide storefront employees to learn from trained decision rules. Moreover, the company can internalize service experience knowledge by aggregating learned rules from the company’s retail stores.     

Benefits and challenges of new mobile service development in R&;D network

The competitive environment of organizations has changed remarkably in line with rapid technological development and globalization of markets. This has lead to a situation where the amount of resources and knowledge needed in the development of new offerings has become overwhelming for a single organization. Consequently, nowadays organizations—both commercial and non-commercial—are performing research and development activities in networks consisting of multiple types of actors. This is also the case in industries developing new services for consumers’ mobile handhelds. This paper introduces a network view to new mobile service development and argues that a thorough understanding of acting in the network environment is a pre-requisite for successful mobile service creation. This viewpoint is emphasized in an information-rich case study, which describes the formation and operations of a network, which created a new mobile service for a sports team. This paper was originally presented at the International Conference on Mobile Business, Sydney, Australia, 11–13 July 2005.     

Understanding the behavior of mobile data services consumers

Due to rapid advances in the Internet and wireless technologies, a ubiquitous computing world is becoming a reality in the form of mobile computing. At the center of this phenomenon is mobile data services which arise from the convergence of advanced mobile communication technologies with data services. Despite the rapid growth in mobile data services, research into consumers’ usage behavior is scarce. This study attempts to identify and empirically assess the factors that drive consumers’ acceptance of mobile data services. A research model based on the decomposed theory of planned behavior and incorporating factors that represent personal needs and motivations in using mobile data services is presented. The model is tested via an online survey of 811 consumers of four categories of mobile data services (i.e., communications, information content, entertainment, and commercial transactions) associated with different usage contexts. We found that attitude, social influence, media influence, perceived mobility, and perceived monetary value influence consumers’ intention to continue usage of mobile data services. In addition, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived enjoyment influence attitude toward continued usage of mobile data services. Finally, separate analysis of the different categories of mobile data services highlights the influence of individual usage context on consumers’ behavior.

Quality management in service ecosystems

Service-oriented architectures and Web services mature and have become more widely accepted and used by industry. This growing adoption increased the demands for new ways of using Web service technology. Users start re-combining and mediating other providers’ services in ways that have not been anticipated by their original provider. Within organisations and cross-organisational communities, discoverable services are organised in repositories providing convenient access to adaptable end-to-end business processes. This idea is captured in the term Service Ecosystem. This paper addresses the question of how quality management can be performed in such service ecosystems. Service quality management is a key challenge when services are composed of a dynamic set of heterogeneous sub-services from different service providers. This paper contributes to this important area by developing a reference model of quality management in service ecosystems. We illustrate the application of the reference model in an exploratory case study. With this case study, we show how the reference model helps to derive requirements for the implementation and support of quality management in an exemplary service ecosystem in public administration.     

Business engagement on Twitter: a path analysis

Social media services, such as Twitter, enable commercial businesses to participate actively in online word-of-mouth communication. In this project, we examined the potential influences of business engagement in online word-of-mouth communication on the level of consumers’ engagement and investigated the trajectories of a business’ online word-of-mouth message diffusion in the Twitter community. We used path analysis to examine 164,478 tweets from 96,725 individual Twitter users with regards to nine brands during a 5-week study period. We operationalized business engagement as the amount of online word-of-mouth messages from brand and the number of consumers the brand follows. We operationalized consumers’ engagement as the number of online word-of-mouth messages from consumers both connecting to the brand and having no connection with the brand as well as the number of consumers following the brand. We concluded that the business engagement on Twitter relates directly to consumers’ engagement with online word-of-mouth communication. In addition, retweeting, as an explicit way to show consumers’ response to business engagement, indicates that the influence only reaches consumers with a second-degree relationship to the brand and that the life cycle of a tweet is generally 1.5 to 4 hours at most. Our research has critical implications in terms of advancing the understanding of the business’s role in the online word-of-mouth communication and bringing insight to the analytics of social networks and online word-of-mouth message diffusion patterns.     

An empirical analysis of the determinants of 3G adoption in China

The main aim of this study is to examine the factors that affect Chinese consumers’ intention to adopt 3G. This study has extended the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by incorporating the determinants of perceived usefulness, cost, trust, and demographic profiles of Chinese consumers. Data is collected from Chinese consumers via self-administered questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was applied to examine the research model proposed. Our result showed that social influence, service quality and perceived ease of use have a direct and significant relationship with perceived usefulness of 3G, and this in turn affects the consumers’ decision to adopt 3G. Contrary to existing TAM research, perceived ease of use was not found to have a direct and significant influence with Chinese consumers’ intention to adopt 3G. Our study also revealed that those with higher educational level are more likely to adopt 3G. Based on the findings, this research is able to propose several practical recommendations to 3G providers in China, such as enhancing the variety of services provided through collaborations with mobile software and content developers. Furthermore, 3G providers can focus on promoting 3G through services such as “Friends and Family” packages as Chinese consumers’ 3G adoption decisions is influenced by their social network. In terms of theoretical contributions, this study has answered many calls from past researchers to investigate the determinants of perceived usefulness. This research was also conducted in China, which is one of the largest telecommunication markets in the world.     

Priority scheduling service for E-commerce web servers

Service scheduling is one of the crucial issues in E-commerce environment. E-commerce web servers often get overloaded as they have to deal with a large number of customers’ requests—for example, browse, search, and pay, in order to make purchases or to get product information from E-commerce web sites. In this paper, we propose a new approach in order to effectively handle high traffic load and to improve web server’s performance. Our solution is to exploit networking techniques and to classify customers’ requests into different classes such that some requests are prioritised over others. We contend that such classification is financially beneficial to E-commerce services as in these services some requests are more valuable than others. For instance, the processing of “browse” request should get less priority than “payment” request as the latter is considered to be more valuable to the service provider. Our approach analyses the arrival process of distinct requests and employs a priority scheduling service at the network nodes that gives preferential treatment to high priority requests. The proposed approach is tested through various experiments which show significant decrease in the response time of high priority requests. This also reduces the probability of dropping high priority requests by a web server and thus enabling service providers to generate more revenue.     

The impact of age and shopping experiences on the classification of search, experience, and credence goods in online shopping

This study explores how age and consumers’ Web shopping experience influence the search, experience, and credence (SEC) ratings of products and services in online shopping. Using the survey data collected from 549 consumers, we investigated how they perceived the uncertainty of product quality on six search, experience, and credence goods. The ANOVA results show that age and the Web consumers’ shopping experience are significant factors. A generation gap is identified for all but one experience good. Web shopping experience is not a significant factor for search goods but is for experience and credence goods. There is an interaction effect between age and Web shopping experience for one credence good. Implications of these results are discussed.     

The perceptions towards mobile services: an empirical analysis of the role of use facilitators

The adoption patterns for new technology such as mobile services are essential to understand for developing them further. Hence, it is important to study how willing people are to try new mobile services and do variables, which facilitate the use of the services have an effect on the consumers’ perceptions of the services and their adoption readiness. This study analyses how the familiarity of mobile devices, the time the services are initially used and users’ technology skills affect the initial mobile service usage experience and the likelihood of continuous usage. The results show that the duration of the use does not effect consumers’ perceptions about mobile services, but familiarity of the device and user skills have an impact on the perceptions of the services.     

Defining the relationships between IT service management and IT service governance

IT service provider organizations need both IT service management (ITSM) and IT service governance (ITSG) to ensure successful service provision for their customers. However, current service science literature has not adequately addressed how these activities differ from each other. Focusing solely on IT service management and ignoring service governance aspects may cause difficulties in measuring the performance of service management, defining and deploying the roles and responsibilities of service management, allocating the resources for right service improvements and adopting the service-oriented process culture. The research problem of this study is: How does IT service management differ from IT service governance? The main contribution of the study is a framework for IT service governance and a roadmap of IT service management frameworks and standards that can be utilized in establishing IT service governance activities. The theory-based framework is validated in an IT service change management case study with five Finnish IT service provider organizations. The results of this study may be used by top management, service directors and the IT service managers of IT service companies to better identify different aspects of IT service management and IT service governance.     

A methodical procedure for designing consumer oriented on-demand IT service propositions

IT providers are increasingly facing the challenge to adapt their previously resource oriented service portfolios in order to offer their customers services which explicitly support business processes. Such customer centric service propositions, however, seem to contradict the demand for standardized and automated operational IT processes more than traditional IT service offers, as they are even more subject to customer individual reengineering efforts due to permanently changing business requirements. In order to reconcile increased efficiency in operational processes and effectiveness in consumer oriented service propositions, we propose (1) to predefine all service propositions in consideration of both consumer oriented commitments and operational processes, and (2) to allow for standardized customization by offering a selection of complementary service propositions that extend commitments regarding customer oriented functionality and performance. Such service propositions are aligned with a company’s entities such as workplaces. Thereby the customer organization is enabled to trace, control and adjust commitments, value and expenses of IT services per entity in its business. We introduce a procedural model for designing and on-demand requesting this kind of service propositions, and we illustrate the model’s application and impact by examples taken from two large projects with an associated IT provider.     

An offer generation approach to SLA negotiation support in service oriented computing

Service level agreement (SLA) plays an important role in realizing service-oriented application. With SLA negotiation mechanism, both parties namely the requester and the provider can exchange information of SLA parameters towards establishing an agreement. In this paper, we study the roles of both parties and focus on how service providers generate offers upon receiving the requests from service requesters. From the provider’s perspective, the provider has to decide the right values to offer based on its current resource availability while aiming to satisfy the requester requirements (if possible). Therefore, in this paper, we propose an approach to addressing offer generation, including the architecture, the information modeling and the generation algorithm. We then provide a case study to illustrate the usefulness of the approach, followed by an analysis to justify the effectiveness of the approach.     

考虑可靠性的物流服务供应链的契约设计

研究考虑有可靠性参与的二级物流服务供应链的优化与协调.研究表明:在研究由第四方物流集成商与第三方物流提供商构成的二级物流服务供应链时,加入提供商的可靠度,利用委托代理理论建立一种基于委托代理理论的有可靠性参与的优化契约模型,有利于提高供应链整体的最优物流能力订购量,提高集成商和提供商的利润;提供商的可靠度与提供商、物流服务供应链的期望利润负相关,与供应商的期望利润正相关.     

Household technology adoption in a global marketplace: Incorporating the role of espoused cultural values

This paper extends prior research in household technology adoption by incorporating the role of espoused cultural values. Specifically, we theorize that espoused cultural values–individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation—play an important role in affecting consumers’ behaviors by altering consumers’ belief structures—attitudinal beliefs, normative beliefs, and control beliefs. Our theoretical model predicts that the impact of consumers’ belief structures on household technology adoption intention varies across consumers with different cultural values. Propositions are provided to explain how different cultural mechanisms moderate the relationships between consumers’ beliefs and household technology adoption intention. The paper concludes with theoretical implications, future research directions, and practical implications.

Modeling semantics in composite Web service requests by utility elicitation

When meeting the challenges in automatic and semi-automatic Web service composition, capturing the user’s service demand and preferences is as important as knowing what the services can do. This paper discusses the idea of semantic service requests for composite services, and presents a multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) based model of composite service requests. Service requests are modeled as user preferences and constraints. Two preference structures, additive independence and generalized additive independence, are utilized in calculating the expected utilities of service composition outcomes. The model is also based on an iterative and incremental scheme meant to better capture requirements in accordance with service consumers’ needs. OWL-S markup vocabularies and associated inference mechanism are used as a means to bring semantics to service requests. Ontology conceptualizations and language constructs are added to OWL-S as uniform representations of possible aspects of the requests. This model of semantics in service requests enables unambiguous understanding of the service needs and more precise generation of the desired compositions. An application scenario is presented to illustrate how the proposed model can be applied in the real business world. Qianhui Althea Liang received her Ph.D from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida in 2004. While pursuing her Ph.D, she was a member of Database Systems Research and Development Center at the University of Florida. She received both her bachelor’s and master’s from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, China. She joined the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University, Singapore, as an assistant professor in 2005. Her major research interests are service composition, dynamic service discovery, multimedia Web services, and applied artificial intelligence. Jen-Yao Chung received the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, he is the senior manager for Engineering and Technology Services Innovation, where he was responsible for identifying and creating emergent solutions. He was Chief Technology Officer for IBM Global Electronics Industry. Before that, he was program director for IBM Institute for Advanced Commerce Technology office. He is the co-founder of IEEE technical committee on e-Commerce (TCEC). He has served as general chair and program chair for many international conferences, most recently he served as the steering committee chair for the IEEE International Conference on e-Commerce Technology (CEC06) and general chair for the IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE06). He has authored or coauthored over 150 technical papers in published journals or conference proceedings. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of ACM. Miller is founding Dean of the School of Information Systems (SIS) at Singapore Management University, and also serves as Practice Professor of Information Systems. Since 2003, he has led efforts to launch and establish the undergraduate, graduate and professional programs of the SIS. Immediately prior to joining SMU, Dr. Miller served as Chief Architect Executive for the Business Consulting Services unit of IBM Global Services in Asia Pacific. He held prior industry appointments with Fujitsu Network Systems, and with RWD Technologies. Dr. Miller started his professional career as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, conducting research and teaching related to Computer-Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics applications and impacts. He has a Bachelors of Engineering Degree in Systems Engineering (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters of Science in Statistics and a Ph.D in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.