In recent years, performance-based contracting (PBC) has emerged as an e¤ective means to align the incentives of the …rms engaged in after-sales repair and maintenance services of highvalued and customized products, such as industrial equipment and aircraft. In particular, PBC has proved to promote improvement of product reliability, an important determinant of product performance. However, idi...

Investment advisory services of financial service providers (FSPs) exhibit several characteristics that are detrimental to advisory quality. The interaction of advisor and client is strained by a lack of transparency regarding the advisory process (what activities are performed and why) and the information used therein (what information is used for what purpose and with what effect), as well as...

Theoretical background: One manifestation of the use artificial intelligence technology in financial services is robo-advisory. Automated assistants are used area communication with consumers and sale products. The development robo-advisory may contribute to increasing availability cost efficiency banks’ operations. So far, however, has not been widely bank services, reasons for this can be see...

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the various company managers who participated in the surveys of Yorkshire & Humberside and Northern Ireland. Abstract Multinational enterprises occupy a prominent position in most UK regional economies. The contribution of these firms to employment and growth in the host region will be enhanced if they purchase material inputs from local firms ('local sour...

We call markets in which intermediaries sell networks of suppliers to consumers who are uncertain about their needs "option demand markets." In these markets, suppliers may grant the intermediaries discounts in order to be admitted to their networks. We derive a measure of each supplier's market power within the network; the measure is based on the additional ex ante expected utility consumers ...

Web Service choreography management challenges the research on Service Oriented Architectures: different from Web Service composition, where a central orchestrator process invokes the Web Service suppliers, a choreographed service is decentralized and it is based on the coordination of a set of Web Service suppliers having a partial view of the overall service. In this paper, we present a frame...

Finding optimal suppliers for complex customer offerings is challenging. For product components like services and rights, relevant information from the potential suppliers is crucial. Social software like online networks, blogs, or wikis might be a place to find this information. Research shows that the adoption of social software highly depends on national attitude. This paper studies the cont...