Fueled by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short business relationships. It appears highly likely that the next generation of e-Business systems will consist of an interconnection of servi...

When designing a service-based business process employing loosely coupled services, one is not only interested in guaranteeing a certain flow of work, but also in how the work will be performed. This involves the consideration of non-functional properties which go from execution time and costs, to trust and security. Ideally, a designer would like to have guarantees over the behavior of the ser...

This paper addresses heterogeneity of business process metamodels and related interchange formats. The different approaches towards interchange format design and effects of interchange format specification are presented first. In particular completeness is identified as an important design criterion for interchange formats. Afterwards the superset of metamodel concepts is extracted from 15 curr...

BACKGROUND Quality is central to understanding provider motivations to join and remain within a social franchising network. Quality also appears as a key issue from the client's perspective, and may influence why a client chooses to use a franchised provider over another type of provider. The dynamic relationships between providers of social franchising clinics and clients who use these service...

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are commonly prepared and signed agreements that form the contracts between a service provider and its customers, defining the obligations and liabilities of the parties. Naturally, SLAs should reflect the business needs of both customer and supplier. SLAs are usually formed through either the adoption of a boilerplate agreement from the provider, or through a me...

Conflicts are common in franchising, however, they become dysfunctional above a certain threshold. Our aim is to understand how conflict management processes and, particular, problem solving, persuasion, bargaining and politics, developed implemented within franchise chains contribute franchisors’ organizational capabilities. We do so through qualitative study based on 44 in-depth interviews wi...

We develop a spatial model of oligopolistic competition in which firms simultaneously choose franchise locations and prices, and consumers receive uncorrelated firmspecific location shocks. Remarkably, when firms only differ along the endogenous contestable spatial dimension, they earn zero profits: while ex-post consumer heterogeneity ensures positive gross profits, competition for market shar...

Previous studies have struggled to demonstrate that higher taxes deter business activity. We revisit this issue by estimating the effect of changes over time in cross-border differences in state tax conditions on the tendency for new establishments to favor one side of a state border over the other. Identification is enhanced by taking account of previously overlooked reciprocal agreements that...