Before 2007, street vending in Bhubaneshwar, the capital city of Odisha (a state in India), exemplified an over-regulated informal economy. Police and municipal inspectors would persistently harass the vendors by threatening them and confiscating their merchandise. The authorities treated street vendors as illegal entities, encroachers on public space, and a source of unsightly nuisance. This n...

A product line is a set of products and features with constraints on which subsets are available. Numerous configurators have been made available by product line vendors on the internet, in which procurers can experiment with the different options, e.g. how the selection of one product or feature entails or precludes the selection of another product or feature. We explore an approach to configu...

Web services are the prominent and newest technology for web application development that converge upon services as their basic element and permits application from different vendors to communicate with each other. The services along with XML protocols enables a number of service providers to provide loosely coupled and interoperable services at different quality of service and cost levels. The...

Due to the entry of Taiwan into WTO and the recently liberalized Petroleum Management Law, the oil market in Taiwan is liberalized and thus is becoming more competitive. However, the space limitation and the residents’ increasing awareness of environmental protection issues in the island make international vendors unavoidably have to rent tanks from domestic oil companies. In order to help the ...

International business theory suggests that multinational corporations are usually disadvantaged compared to local firms when competing in a host market. However, we find foreign enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors the Chinese high-end ERP market perform significantly better than vendors. To understand this gap, authors first analyze model and its four characteristics as service use Dunn...

For software vendors the processes of release, delivery, and deployment to customers are inherently complex. However, software vendors can greatly improve their product quality and quality of service by applying a model that focuses on customer interaction if such a model were available. This paper presents a model for customer configuration updating (CCU) that can evaluate the capabilities of ...