Multilevel Pricing Schemes in a Deregulated Wireless Network Market

Typically the cost of a product, a good or a service has many components. Those components come from different complex steps in the supply chain of the product from sourcing to distribution. This economic point of view also takes place in the determination of goods and services in wireless networks. Indeed, before transmitting customer data, a network operator has to lease some frequency range from a spectrum owner and also has to establish agreements with electricity suppliers. The goal of this paper is to compare two pricing schemes, namely a power-based and a flat rate, and give a possible explanation why flat rate pricing schemes are more common than power based pricing ones in a deregulated wireless market. We suggest a hierarchical game-theoretical model of a three level supply chain: the end users, the service provider and the spectrum owner. The end users intend to transmit data on a wireless network. The amount of traffic sent by the end users depends on the available frequency bandwidth as well as the price they have to pay for their transmission. A natural question arises for the service provider: how to design an efficient pricing scheme in order to maximize his profit. Moreover he has to take into account the lease charge he has to pay to the spectrum owner and how many frequency bandwidth to rent. The spectrum owner itself also looks for maximizing its profit and has to determine the lease price to the service provider. The equilibrium at each level of our supply chain model are established and several properties are investigated. In particular, in the case of a power-based pricing scheme, the service provider and the spectrum owner tend to share the gross provider profit. Whereas, considering the flat rate pricing scheme, if the end users are going to exploit the network intensively, then the tariffs of the suppliers (spectrum owner and service provider) explode.Comment: This is the last draft version of the paper. Revised version of the paper accepted by ValueTools 2013 can be found in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools (ValueTools '13), December 10-12, 2013, Turin, Ital

International Outsourcing and the Supply Side Productivity Determinants

A service provider firm in an outsourcing relationship is distinct from a typical firm because it is not a stand alone organization and fits somewhere in between the value chain of its client’s business. Thus, conventional factors like wages, capital, rent, energy consumption cannot appropriately determine a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm’s productivity. Academic research is silent on the factors that influence the performance of a BPO firm even though the issue is pertinent from the perspective of the host country, the sourcing firm, the global outsourcing industry and of course the service provider firm. In this paper, we embark on to explore these factors.productivity, outsourcing, third party vendor

Interface refactoring in performance-constrained web services

This paper presents the development of REF-WS an approach to enable a Web Service provider to reliably evolve their service through the application of refactoring transformations. REF-WS is intended to aid service providers, particularly in a reliability and performance constrained domain as it permits upgraded ’non-backwards compatible’ services to be deployed into a performance constrained network where existing consumers depend on an older version of the service interface. In order for this to be successful, the refactoring and message mediation needs to occur without affecting functional compatibility with the services’ consumers, and must operate within the performance overhead expected of the original service, introducing as little latency as possible. Furthermore, compared to a manually programmed solution, the presented approach enables the service developer to apply and parameterize refactorings with a level of confidence that they will not produce an invalid or ’corrupt’ transformation of messages. This is achieved through the use of preconditions for the defined refactorings

The impact of green logistics service quality on logistics provider performance

Paper delivered at the 19th Logistics Research Network annual conference 2014, 3rd-5th September 2014, Huddersfield. Effective and efficient logistics services can enhance the firm’s competitive advantage. Therefore, logistics management can be considered as a key component of organisational effectiveness and success (Khan and Burnes, 2007). At the same time, environmental or green issues in logistics service offerings have attracted much managerial attention in the logistics industry for the future. One important objective is for logistics service providers (LSPs) to deliver their service offerings to customers in more environmentally friendly ways. The study is ongoing project and investigates variables and constructs of green service quality, logistics service quality and logistics performance index in Thailand. The purpose of this paper is to report on an ongoing study of the importance and relationship of green service quality (GSQ) competencies relative to logistics service quality (LSQ) competencies in the context of Thai LSPs

The challenges of providing public water and sanitation services in a rural town in Zambia : The case of the southern water and sewerage company in Choma town

The paper reports on whether the performance of privatized water and sanitation companies in Zambia have lived up to expectations of improving the quality of the services to the consumers using a case study of the performance of Southern Water and Sewerage Company (SWASCO) in Choma town. To determine consumer ability to pay for water and sanitation services since privatization, eight sample figures each of recovery rates before and after privatization were compared using simple algebraic comparison. Results as shown by histograms, confirm that despite the increase in tariffs for services, more consumers are able to pay for the services after privatization. To assess the effectiveness of the privatized water and sewerage service provider, The percentage of account holders with in dwelling water taps before privatization were compared to respective percentage after privatization. The results of simple algebraic comparison confirm that the privatized Water and Sewerage service provider in Choma has proportionally increased the number of account holders with in dwelling water taps and hence has improved the effectiveness of service delivery. To determine whether privatized water and sewerage service provider is delivering quality services to the satisfaction of consumers, a random sample of 528 household account holders (representing 20% of household account holders in Choma) from major residential areas in Choma were surveyed. The results confirm that the privatized service provider is delivering quality services according to consumers as regards six important service indicators identified. However, the study reveals that there is a lot of scope for the privatized water service provider in Choma to further improve the services. This is in accordance with number of challenges identified during the unstructured interviews with the management officials of the privatized service provider. The biggest challenge is for the privatized service provider to balance between social and commercial interests in the provision of water and sanitation services as the country strives to achieve millennium development goals. (Résumé d'auteur

Penalty and reward contracts between a manufacturer and its logistics service provider

Contracts are used to coordinate disparate but interdependent members of the supply chain. Conflicting objectives of these members and lack of coordination among the members lead to inefficiencies in matching supply with demand. This study reviews different types of contracts and proposes a methodology to be used by companies for analyzing coordinating contracts with their business partners. Efficiency of the contract is determined by comparing the performance of independent companies under the contract to the supply chain performance under the central decision maker assumption. We propose a penalty and reward contract between a manufacturer and its logistics service provider that distributes the manufacturer’s products on its retail network. The proposed contract analysis methodology is empirically tested with transportation data of a consumer durable goods company (CDG) and its logistics service provider (LSP). The results of this case study suggest a penalty and reward contract between the CDG and its LSP that improves not only the individual firm’s objective functions but also the supply chain costs. Compared to the existing situation, the coordination efficiency of the penalty and reward contract is 96.1 %, proving that optimizing contract parameters improves coordination and leads to higher efficiencies

Integrating personal media and digital TV with QoS guarantees using virtualized set-top boxes: architecture and performance measurements

Nowadays, users consume a lot of functionality in their home coming from a service provider located in the Internet. While the home network is typically shielded off as much as possible from the `outside world', the supplied services could be greatly extended if it was possible to use local information. In this article, an extended service is presented that integrates the user's multimedia content, scattered over multiple devices in the home network, into the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) of the Digital TV. We propose to virtualize the set-top box, by migrating all functionality except user interfacing to the service provider infrastructure. The media in the home network is discovered through standard Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), of which the QoS functionality is exploited to ensure high quality playback over the home network, that basically is out of the control of the service provider. The performance of the subsystems are analysed

The case for cloud service trustmarks and assurance-as-a-service

Cloud computing represents a significant economic opportunity for Europe. However, this growth is threatened by adoption barriers largely related to trust. This position paper examines trust and confidence issues in cloud computing and advances a case for addressing them through the implementation of a novel trustmark scheme for cloud service providers. The proposed trustmark would be both active and dynamic featuring multi-modal information about the performance of the underlying cloud service. The trustmarks would be informed by live performance data from the cloud service provider, or ideally an independent third-party accountability and assurance service that would communicate up-to-date information relating to service performance and dependability. By combining assurance measures with a remediation scheme, cloud service providers could both signal dependability to customers and the wider marketplace and provide customers, auditors and regulators with a mechanism for determining accountability in the event of failure or non-compliance. As a result, the trustmarks would convey to consumers of cloud services and other stakeholders that strong assurance and accountability measures are in place for the service in question and thereby address trust and confidence issues in cloud computing