In some countries, cellular wireless roaming charges are prohibitive possibly because the incumbent access-provider is actually or essentially state-run, unlike potential entrants, i.e., the regulator (state) is in a conflict of interest. In other countries, e.g., France, there is a lot of competition among Internet Service (access) Providers (ISPs). Recently, Free purchased a spectrum license ...

With the development of the Internet and Electronic Commerce (EC), enterprises have overcome the space and time barriers and are now capable of serving customers electronically. However, it is a great challenge to attract and retain the customers over Internet. One approach is to provide the responsive personalized service to satisfy the customer demand and promote sales at the first time. Henc...

Financial institutions see the Internet as an important channel and many have built websites to inform and attract customers. Financial aggregation services as represented by “Account Aggregator” present an opportunity by which financial institutions can build stronger relationships with customers. Account aggregation services began in the United States, but they are now widely used by financia...

A virtual community (VC) of committed members is of great strategic value to online firms and vendors owing to its ability to attract and retain members. However, online firms and vendors find it difficult to instill commitment among their VC members. Therefore, this study examines the mechanism of customer commitment formation in a relationship-cum-interest based VC. By understanding the mecha...

This paper investigates the adoption level of a network service where the net utility perceived by each user incorporates three key features, namely, user service affinity heterogeneity, a network externality, and a subscription cost. Services with network externality face a “chicken and egg” adoption problem in that the service requires customers in order to attract customers. In this paper we...

Abstract. We implemented three different types of pricing agents in a simulated economy. Each type of agent is based on a different learning method. The first method is simple reinforcement learning. The second method is the traditional Q-learning method. The third method is Nash Q-learning method. In each simulation, there are two agents, and a fixed amount of customers. The agent that charges...

SDG-backed green finance efforts have become popular vehicles for private investors to participate in development collaborations. We critically examine two transnational renewable energy projects Zambia, drawing on the financialization literature and, particularly, concept of de-risking. find that new public–private partnership coalitions impose a global market and financial logic Zambian secto...

The open service market encourages competition between service providers. To attract and keep customers, service providers require – amongst other things better tools and techniques to increase their competitiveness. In this paper we address one area for tool support: namely, tools for the support of service quality assurance, i.e. so that checks can be made to ensure that services (and the net...

Sponsored search is a new application domain for the feature selection area of research. When a user searches for products or services using the Internet, most of the major search engines would return two sets of results: regular web pages and paid advertisements. An advertising company provides a set of keywords associated with an ad. If one of these keywords is present in a user’s query, the ...