Ambient E-Services: Framework and Applications

Most of existing mobile services were designed based on the client/server architecture. Those mobile services neither paid much attention to mobile users’ interactions with their environments nor considered the cooperation efforts between the mobile users in a dynamic peer group. In this paper, the notion of ambient e-services is defined to identify a new scope of mobile e-services. The notable features of ambient e-services are the exhilarated linkage based on social context and significantly rapid growth of connections. We also present an ambient e-service framework that characterizes ambient e-services with three dimensions (value stack, environment stack and technology stack). We exemplify several ambient e-service applications, which rest on the mobile peer-to-peer technology and ambient context aware sensors environments. Ambient e-services make a mobile user not only connect to dynamic ambient environments but also build channels that connect with other mobile users in the nearby surrounding environment, capitalizing dynamic environmental values as well as dynamic social values. Lastly, we identify for ambient e-services certain important issues worthy of future intensive research

E-QUAL: A Quantitative Model of User Co-Creation Experience Quality

This paper sets forth a quantitative model, indicating how a set of measures to assess co-creation experience quality of service providers and customers (E-QUAL) in a service process. Inspired by ecological mutualistic evolution and evolutionary fitness, both partnership and adaptability for service participants in service exchange resemble the relationship of mutualism for species in symbiotic ecosystem. However, the three criteria (PR, ED, and UR) and interactive fitness (IF) are used to test the partnership and estimate the adaptability for assessing user co-creation experience quality within the collaborative service with value co-production. In this article we demonstrate a service system that uses the E-QUAL to evaluate value co-creation experience quality. From the perspective of practice, the measurable model, on the other hand, facilitates an interaction-based self-service system to meet (semi-)automated value co-production

iPrice: A Collaborative Pricing Model for e-Service Bundle Delivery

Information goods pricing is an essential and emerging topic in the era of information economy. Myriad researchers have devoted considerable attention to developing and testing methods of information goods pricing. Nevertheless, in addition; there are still certain shortcomings as the challenges to be overcome. This study encompasses several unexplored concepts that have attracted research attention in other disciplines lately, such as collaborative prototyping, prospect theory, ERG theory, and maintenance from design, economic, psychological, and software engineering respectively. This study proposes a novel conceptual framework for information goods pricing and investigates the impact of three advantages: (1) provides collaborative process that could generate several prototypes via trial and error in pricing process, (2) deliberates the belief of consumer and producer by maximizing utility and profit, and (3) offers an appropriate service bundle by interacting with consumer and discovering the actual needs

Design of the Customer Expectation Measurement Model in Dynamic Service Experience Delivery

Customer-focused service design and innovation is critical in enabling service firms to deliver what customers want. Although numerous studies have emphasized the importance of customer expectations in numerous disciplines, previous empirical research has only captured non real-time data. Furthermore, previous research contains no mathematical mechanism for correctly catching customer expectations. Service firms therefore must make additional efforts to analyze and predict customer needs according to previous empirical research, yet their predictions and customer expectations continue to exhibit a significant gap. Accordingly, this study proposes a systematical and quantitative customer expectation measurement model based on Fechner’s Law and the concepts of operation risk that service firms can use to measure real time customer expectations during service experience delivery. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol2/iss3/3

Knowledge-based decision model construction for hierarchical diagnosis and repair

Knowledge-Based Model Construction (KBMC) has generated a lot of attention due to its importance as a technique for generating probabilistic or decision-theoretic models whose range of applicability in AI has been vastly increased. However, no one has tried to analyze the essential issues in KBMC, to determine if there exists a general efficient KBMC method for any problem domain, or to y identify the fruitful future research on KBMC. This research presents a unified framework for comparative analysis of KBMC systems identifying the essential issues in KBMC, showing that there is no such general efficient KBMC method, and listing the fruitful future research on KBMC. This thesis then presents a new KBMC mechanism for hierarchical diagnosis and repair. Diagnosis is formulated as a stochastic process and modeled using influence diagrams. In the best case using an abstraction hierarchy in problem-solving can yield an exponential speedup in search efficiency. However, this speedup assumes backtracking never occurs across abstraction levels. When this assumption fails, search may have to consider different abstract solutions before finding one that can be refined to a base solution, and, therefore, search efficiency is not necessarily improved. In this thesis, we present a decision model construction method for hierarchical diagnosis and repair. We show analytically and experimentally that our method always yields a significant speedup in search efficiency, and that hierarchies with smaller branching factors yield more significant efficiency gains. This thesis employs two causal pathways (functional and bridge fault) of domain knowledge in device trouble shooting, preventing either whole class of faults we will never be able to diagnose. Each causal pathway models the knowledge of adjacency and behavior within the corresponding interaction layer. Careful search of causal pathways allows us to restrict the search space of fault hypotheses at each time. We model this search among causal pathways decision-theoretically. Decision-theoretic control usually results in significant improvements over unaided human expert judgments. Furthermore, these improvements in performance are robust to substantial errors in the assessed costs and probabilities

The Roles of Customer Expectation and Emotion in Service Experience

This research advanced the development for a theoretical framework of service experience in Service Science discipline. Service experience is composed of a series of complicated services and influenced by many factors. Customer psychological status is the important one to be investigated. Accordingly, we proposed a theoretical framework of service experience based on the perspectives of customer expectation and emotion. Good customer expectation management for service providers will increase the opportunity of customer satisfaction of service experience. In order to ensure that customers can have positive behaviors and responses during service experience delivery, developing an atmospheric service context to generate positive customer emotion is also important. Three hypothetical propositions are provided to illustrate the theoretical framework of service experience. This study evaluated the theoretical framework of service experience by using the multi-method. The analysis results from interviews and questionnaires are the solid evidences to support the theoretical framework of service experience

Color Imagery for Destination Recommendation in Regional Tourism

This paper presents a novel recommender service system that considers the image as a uniform representation for tourists’ expectations, destinations, and local tourism SMEs. Images carried by each stakeholder role is modeled and managed by several system modules, and they also evolve to reflect the real time situations of each entity. In addition, the system is dynamic in terms of its emphasis on the dynamic relationships among these roles and entities. When interactions occur, image mixing will be conducted to derive extra image attributes for the adjustments of the images. Besides, since colors can be mapped onto emotions, this paper adopts colors to operate the image matching and mixing process in order to find good matches of destinations for the recommendations meeting the tourists’ emotional needs. Although this image related approach we proposed is used in tourism domain, we believe our method could also contribute to other areas of either practical applications or academic studies

Hawk-Dove Game Based Interactive Design to Manage Customer Expectation

In the era of experience economy, how best to deliver memorable and exciting customer experiences has become a key issue for service providers, and customers can involve themselves in service experience delivery by actively deciding appropriate services rather than passively accepting existing ones. However, service providers frequently consider profit and cost first despite knowing that high-quality service can maximize satisfaction. A dilemma emerges particularly in the oligopoly market. Oligopoly service providers generally have no need to expend additional efforts and costs in attracting customers, and thus are considered a value-bounded context for customers in which providers only provide customers with existing services and restricted values. Accordingly, this study devises an interaction design mechanism to assist oligopoly service providers in effectively managing customer expectations within the dynamic interactions even in value-bounded contexts. The proposed mechanism models this interaction design problem as a series of Hawk-Dove games toward an evolutionary stable state. The simulation results suggest that oligopoly service providers should change their original mindset and design the interactions to manage customer expectations within the service experience delivery to not only achieve high satisfaction and profit but also engage customers to co-create the values