Nowadays, competitive market creates the necessity of quality improvement in different levels of supply chains (SCs). This paper contributes to the SC coordination literature and proposes a bilateral coordination contract for optimizing pricing decisions along with quality improvement decisions in different echelons of a real case of a cell phone SC. The SC comprises a manufacturer who deals wi...

Based on Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic and related perspectives, which suggest that value is co-created through the integration of resources, this study proposes a model which considers two value co-creation sources: (1) firm resources, in the form of process Electronic-Service Quality (ESQ) and outcome ESQ, and (2) consumer resources, as represented by consumer expertise and its antecedents (i....

A review is given on the development of passive samplers for aquatic environments. Passive samplers that are simple and easy to use and with minimal consumption of organic solvents to desorb the analytes from the trapping media are focused. New developments in quality assurance procedures are highlighted.

In today’s competitive business environment, it is extremely important to offer customers exactly the products they want. Software product lines have the potential to enable companies to offer a larger variety of products while still being able to manage the complexity caused by this increased number of products. But offering a large number of variants does not necessarily mean increased profit...

When product quality is unobservable to consumers, a manufacturer can convey the quality information using signals such as warranty and brand reputation. The purpose of this paper is to study the interactions between warranty, brand reputation, and product quality, and to examine the quality signaling strategies. We model a monopolist who tries to convey unobservable product quality to heteroge...

In today's embedded software systems development, non-functional requirements (e.g., dependability, maintainability) become more and more important. Simultaneously the increasing pressure for developing software in shorter time and at a lower cost pushes software industry towards product lines solutions. To support product lines for high quality embedded software, quality models are needed. In ...

Software qualities are in many cases tacit and hard to measure. Thus, there is a potential risk that they get lower priority than deadlines, cost and functionality. Yet software qualities impact customers, profits and even developer efficiency. This paper presents a method to evaluate the priority of software qualities in an industrial context. The method is applied in an exploratory case study...

A model for software product quality is defined. It has been formulated by associating a set of qualitycarrying properties with each of the structural forms that are used to define the statements and statement components of a programming language. These quality-carrying properties are in turn linked to the highlevel quality attributes of the International Standard for Software Product Evaluatio...