While home services is a fast growing industry, little attention has been given to the management of its workforce. In particular, the productivity of home-service technicians depends not only on efficiently routing from customer-to-customer, but also the management of their skillsets. This paper introduces a model of technician routing that explicitly models individualized, experience-based le...

A rapidly changing competitive landscape and dynamic customer expectations require manufacturing firms to seek flexibility in product development. Product concept flexibility (i.e., developing design options) and product prototype flexibility (i.e., creating working models) emerge as effective ways to quickly develop new products that meet competitive challenges and satisfy customer demands. Pr...

One important aspect of consumer relationships is trust. Conducting business on the Web is relatively new compared to traditional business and many of the factors related to consumer trust related to the Web remained unexplored. To increase our understanding about trust building on the Internet, this article studies trust with a focus on its relationship to Web design characteristics, specifica...

In Today’s quality- based competitive world, known as knowledge age, customer attraction is of ultimate importance. In respect to the slogan “customer is always right”, customer relation management is the core of an organizational strategy playing an important role in four aspects of customer identification, customer attraction, customer retaining, and customer satisfaction. Commercial organiza...

Quality function development (QFD) is a planning tools used to fulfill customer expectation and QFD is a systematic process to translating customer requirement (WHATs) into technical description (HOWs). QFD aims to maximize customer satisfactions related to enterprise satisfaction. The inherent fuzziness of relationships in QFD modeling justifies the use of fuzzy regression for estimating the r...

The recent consumer-to-consumer (C2C) Internet auction boom at eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and other sites has added new theoretical challenges to the science of auctions. This paper uses experiments with economically-motivated human subjects to measure the operational efficiency of decentralized Internet auction mechanisms as they compare to centralized double auction mechanisms. Subjects are recruit...

Web-mediated consumer-to-consumer auctions are often regarded as risky due to the opportunistic behaviors in transaction. Online virtual community using feedback-based reputation service is an emerging trust building technology to reduce risk in online auction market. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of feedback profiles on buyer’s purchase behavior. Based on previous researches...

M firms compete in two connected markets. They face rivalry for the sale of content to consumers, and at the same time, they compete for advertisers seeking access to the attention of these consumers. We explore the implications of such two-sided competition on the actions and source of profits of media firms. One main conclusion we reach is that media firms may charge higher content prices in ...

It is evident that there is a strong competition among organizations and a sort of rapid change in the business environment is taking place. Therefore; organizations start thinking of how to improve their processes to stay competent. Knowledge has become a strategic resource and a basis of competitive advantage in the organization. However, many organizations lost sight of managing Knowledge to...