An Experiment in SLA Decision-Making

Decision-making with regard to availability service level agreements (SLAs) is investigated. An experimental economics approach was used to elicit the preferences for different SLA alternatives from the subjects (N = 16), all professionally working with IT management. A previously published scenario on downtime costs in the retail business was used in the experimental setup. Subjects made 18 pairwise choices under uncertainty. After the experiment, they were paid based on one of their choices, randomly selected. The subjects rarely behaved as expected utility maximizers in the experiment. This raises questions about company SLA management in real situations, and calls for further research.