CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIC ALLIANCES IN THE FOOD INDUSTRY

This paper focuses on strategic fuzzy alliances (SFAs) and the role of trust in business-to-business relationships. First, a theoretical model of governance choice involving strategic alliances is developed, integrating the Shapiro, Sheppard, and Cheraskin (1992) taxonomy of trust into a neoinstitutional framework. Second, this model, based on transaction theory, is then used to generate necessary and sufficient conditions for trust-based agreements. The third component of this paper is an empirical model, which tests the above theory. Finally, managerial implications from the results are discussed.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Strategic and Blockchain-based Market Decisions for Cloud Computing

The cloud computing market has been in the center of attention for years where cloud providers strive to survive by either competition or cooperation. Some cloud providers choose to compete in the market that is dominated by few large providers and try to maximize their profit without sacrificing the service quality which leads to higher user ratings. Many research proposals tried to contribute to the cloud market competition. However, the majority of these proposals focus only on pricing mechanisms, neglecting thus the cloud service quality and users satisfaction. Meanwhile, cloud providers intend to form cloud federations to enhance their services quality and revenues. Nevertheless, traditional centralized cloud federations have strict challenges that might hinder the members' motivation to participate in, such as formation of stable coalitions with long-term commitments, participants' trustworthiness, shared revenue, and security of the managed data and services. For a stable and trustworthy federation, it is vital to avoid blind-trust on the claimed SLA guarantees from the members and monitor the quality of service considering the various characteristics of cloud services. This thesis aims to tackle the issues of cloud computing market from the two perspectives of competition and cooperation by: 1) modeling and solving the conflicting situation of revenue, user ratings and service quality, to improve the providers position in the market and increase the future users' demand; 2) proposing a user-centric game theoretical framework to allow the new and smaller cloud providers to have a share in the market and increase users satisfaction through providing high quality and added-value services; 3) motivating the cloud providers to adopt a coopetition behavior through a novel, fully distributed blockchain-based federation's structure that enables them to trade their computing resources through smart contracts; 4) introducing a new role of oracle as a verifier agent to monitor the quality of service and report to the smart contract agents deployed on the blockchain while optimizing the cost of using oracles; and 5) developing a Bayesian bandit learning oracles reliability mechanism to select the oracles smartly and optimize the cost and reliability of utilized oracles. All of the contributions are validated by simulations and implementations using real-world data

A Competition-based Pricing Strategy in Cloud Markets using Regret Minimization Techniques

Cloud computing as a fairly new commercial paradigm, widely investigated by different researchers, already has a great range of challenges. Pricing is a major problem in Cloud computing marketplace; as providers are competing to attract more customers without knowing the pricing policies of each other. To overcome this lack of knowledge, we model their competition by an incomplete-information game. Considering the issue, this work proposes a pricing policy related to the regret minimization algorithm and applies it to the considered incomplete-information game. Based on the competition based marketplace of the Cloud, providers update the distribution of their strategies using the experienced regret. The idea of iteratively applying the algorithm for updating probabilities of strategies causes the regret get minimized faster. The experimental results show much more increase in profits of the providers in comparison with other pricing policies. Besides, the efficiency of a variety of regret minimization techniques in a simulated marketplace of Cloud are discussed which have not been observed in the studied literature. Moreover, return on investment of providers in considered organizations is studied and promising results appeared

Pricing the Cloud: An Auction Approach

Cloud computing has changed the processing and service modes of information communication technology and has affected the transformation, upgrading and innovation of the IT-related industry systems. The rapid development of cloud computing in business practice has spawned a whole new field of interdisciplinary, providing opportunities and challenges for business management research. One of the critical factors impacting cloud computing is how to price cloud services. An appropriate pricing strategy has important practical means to stakeholders, especially to providers and customers. This study addressed and discussed research findings on cloud computing pricing strategies, such as fixed pricing, bidding pricing, and dynamic pricing. Another key factor for cloud computing is Quality of Service (QoS), such as availability, reliability, latency, security, throughput, capacity, scalability, elasticity, etc. Cloud providers seek to improve QoS to attract more potential customers; while, customers intend to find QoS matching services that do not exceed their budget constraints. Based on the existing study, a hybrid QoS-based pricing mechanism, which consists of subscription and dynamic auction design, is proposed and illustrated to cloud services. The results indicate that our hybrid pricing mechanism has potential to better allocate available cloud resources, aiming at increasing revenues for providers and reducing expenses for customers in practice

Designing Business Models for Platform as a Service: Towards a Design Theory

Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions are changing the way that software is produced, distributed, consumed, and priced. Unlike Software as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS allows for value co-creation by offering complementary components and applications that are developed in emerging ecosystems of third-party developers. Despite increasing interest among practitioners and researchers, there has been little work in understanding how PaaS business models should be designed to establish a flourishing ecosystem. We aim at developing a design theory that facilitates the design of PaaS business models, taking into account the specifics of multisided business models. Four meta-requirements describe the purpose and scope of our design theory, and six design principles guide PaaS providers in designing effective business models. By focusing on designing business models, our research goes beyond previous approaches for studying PaaS

Automated Bidding in Computing Service Markets. Strategies, Architectures, Protocols

This dissertation contributes to the research on Computational Mechanism Design by providing novel theoretical and software models - a novel bidding strategy called Q-Strategy, which automates bidding processes in imperfect information markets, a software framework for realizing agents and bidding strategies called BidGenerator and a communication protocol called MX/CS, for expressing and exchanging economic and technical information in a market-based scheduling system

Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing

The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies

Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing

The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies