Firms often need to promise a certain level of service quality to attract customers, and a central question is how to design promises to balance the trade-off between customer acquisition and customer retention. For example, most E-commerce platforms need to promise a certain delivery time....

This paper investigates the impact of determination of an original initiator of transmission on demand as well as profits of the providers. For that purpose we present a new model, called differentiated traffic-based interconnection agreement (DTIA) that differentiates traffic into two types,...

Cost allocation between interconnected networks is based on measured traffic flows. This principle, however, does not provide a fair way for sharing costs. In this paper, a new bilateral model, called Differentiated Traffic-based Interconnection Agreement (DTIA) for intercarrier compensation is...

In terms of intercarrier compensation traffic flows are measured to allocate the costs between networks. This method provides a poor basis for sharing any costs. In this work we analyze the benefits of the traffic differentiation on the interconnection charges in unilateral and bilateral...

This paper addresses the inter-provider costs sharing issue by exploring the effect of the traffic differentiation on the interconnection payments. In particular, we determine an original initiator of a transmission by means of traffic differentiation into two types, referred to as native and...

Based on the promising developments in Cloud Computing technologies in recent years, commercial computing resource services (e.g. Amazon EC2) or software-as-a-service offerings (e.g. Salesforce.com) came into existence. However, the relatively weak business exploitation, participation, and...

One of the most important properties of self-organized networks is their scale-free property. Prior research proved empirically and theoretically that scale-free networks emerge under the preferential attachment rule. However, a few empirical studies also show that empirical networks diverge...

Research into computing resource markets has mainly considered the question of which market mechanisms provide a fair resource allocation. However, while developing such markets, the definition of the unit of trade (i.e. the definition of resource) has not been given much attention. In this...

Web2.0 users can create new services by combining existing Web2.0 services that offer open programming interfaces. This system of service composition forms a network, which we call the Web2.0 service network. A node of the Web2.0 service network represents a service. A link between two nodes...

Multi-unit franchising (MUF) is a governance form inside franchising networks where the franchisor transfers to the franchisees the right to own and operate more than one outlet. While previous empirical literature has revealed various advantages of MUF as compared to single-unit franchising...