A utility-based model to define the optimal data quality level in IT service offerings

In the information age, enterprises base or enrich their core business activities with the provision of informative services. For this reason, organizations are becoming increasingly aware of data quality issues, which concern the evaluation of the ability of a data collection to meet users’ needs. Data quality is a multidimensional and subjective issue, since it is defined by a variety of criteria, whose definition and evaluation is strictly dependent on the context and users involved. Thus, when considering data quality, the users’ perspective should always be considered fundamental. Authors in data quality literature agree that providers should adapt, and consequently improve, their service offerings in order to completely satisfy users’ demands. However, we argue that, in service provisioning, providers are subject to restrictions stemming, for instance, from costs and benefits assessments. Therefore, we identify the need for a conciliation of providers’ and users’ quality targets in defining the optimal data quality level of an informative service. The definition of such equilibrium is a complex issue since each type of user accessing the service may define different utilities regarding the provided information. Considering this scenario, the paper presents a utility-based model of the providers’ and customers’ interests developed on the basis of multi-class offerings. The model is exploited to analyze the optimal service offerings that allow the efficient allocation of quality improvements activities for the provider

Il turista della società post-moderna: la cultura del new life tourism Spazio, luogo e non luogo Turismo, paesaggio, spazi pubblici e rigenerazione urbana Tematismi e tematizzazione. Itinerari culturali e strade turistiche per una ricomposizione spaziale.

I materiali sono composti dalle prime tre presentazioni, i contributi dedicati al tema dell'autenticità, della diversa interpretazione di spazio, luogo e non luogo e degli itinerari culturali. Completano questo primo deposito di materiale didattico due approfondimenti sulla Consumer Culture Theory e Service Dominat Logic

Monopoly quality degradation and regulation in cable television

Using an empirical framework based on the Mussa-Rosen model of monopoly quality choice, we calculate the degree of quality degradation in cable television markets and the impact of regulation on those choices. We find lower bounds of quality degradation ranging from 11 to 45 percent of offered service qualities. Furthermore, cable operators in markets with local regulatory oversight offer significantly higher quality, less degradation, and greater quality per dollar, despite higher prices

Seeing Shapes in Clouds: On the Performance-Cost trade-off for Heterogeneous Infrastructure-as-a-Service

In the near future FPGAs will be available by the hour, however this new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) usage mode presents both an opportunity and a challenge: The opportunity is that programmers can potentially trade resources for performance on a much larger scale, for much shorter periods of time than before. The challenge is in finding and traversing the trade-off for heterogeneous IaaS that guarantees increased resources result in the greatest possible increased performance. Such a trade-off is Pareto optimal. The Pareto optimal trade-off for clusters of heterogeneous resources can be found by solving multiple, multi-objective optimisation problems, resulting in an optimal allocation of tasks to the available platforms. Solving these optimisation programs can be done using simple heuristic approaches or formal Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) techniques. When pricing 128 financial options using a Monte Carlo algorithm upon a heterogeneous cluster of Multicore CPU, GPU and FPGA platforms, the MILP approach produces a trade-off that is up to 110% faster than a heuristic approach, and over 50% cheaper. These results suggest that high quality performance-resource trade-offs of heterogeneous IaaS are best realised through a formal optimisation approach.Comment: Presented at Second International Workshop on FPGAs for Software Programmers (FSP 2015) (arXiv:1508.06320

The effect of competition among brokers on the quality and price of differentiated internet services

Price war, as an important factor in undercutting competitors and attracting customers, has spurred considerable work that analyzes such conflict situation. However, in most of these studies, quality of service (QoS), as an important decision-making criterion, has been neglected. Furthermore, with the rise of service-oriented architectures, where players may offer different levels of QoS for different prices, more studies are needed to examine the interaction among players within the service hierarchy. In this paper, we present a new approach to modeling price competition in (virtualized) service-oriented architectures, where there are multiple service levels. In our model, brokers, as the intermediaries between end-users and service providers, offer different QoS by adapting the service that they obtain from lower-level providers so as to match the demands of their clients to the services of providers. To maximize profit, players, i.e. providers and brokers, at each level compete in a Bertrand game while they offer different QoS. To maintain an oligopoly market, we then describe underlying dynamics which lead to a Bertrand game with price constraints at the providers' level. Numerical simulations demonstrate the behavior of brokers and providers and the effect of price competition on their market shares.This work has been partly supported by National Science Foundation awards: CNS-0963974, CNS-1346688, CNS-1536090 and CNS-1647084

Non-functional Property based service selection: A survey and classification of approaches

In recent years there has been much effort dedicated to developing approaches for service selection based on non-functional properties. It is clear that much progress has been made, and by considering the individual approaches there is some overlap in functionality, but obviously also some divergence. In this paper we contribute a classification of approaches, that is, we define a number of criteria which allow to differentiate approaches. We use this classification to provide a comparison of existing approaches and in that sense provide a survey of the state of the art of the field. Finally we make some suggestions as to where the research in this area might be heading and which new challenges need to be addressed