Retailer selection in future open competitive communications environments

Abstract: The highly competitive communications markets of the future should encompass mechanisms for enabling users to find and associate with the most appropriate retailers, i.e., those offering at a certain time period, adequate quality services in a cost efficient manner. This paper presents such mechanisms. Our starting point is the definition of a business case, through which the role of the best candidate-retailer selection problem is explained. In the sequel, the problem is analysed and the identified sub-problems are concisely defined, mathematically formulated and solved. The identified components of the best candidateretailer selection problem are targeted to the evaluation of the quality of a retailer offer and the reduction of the set of candidate retailers by exploiting learning from experience notions. At the final sections results are provided and concluding remarks are made.