Cloud Computing provides user a complete software environment. To serve resources to customers, Software as a Service providers rent resources from the Infrastructure as a Service Providers. Client applications and service providers negotiate for the sales of services by means of Service Level Agreement (SLA) that acts as a contract between them. Depending on the status of the demand, Infrastru...

Online Social Networks (OSNs) attract billions of users to share information and communicate where viral marketing has emerged as a new way to promote the sales of products. An OSN provider is often hired by an advertiser to conduct viral marketing campaigns. The OSN provider generates revenue from the commission paid by the advertiser which is determined by the spread of its product informatio...

As agents for their patients, providers often make treatment decisions on behalf of patients, and their choices can affect health outcomes. However, providers operate within a network of relationships and are agents not only for their patients, but also other health sector actors, such as their employer, the Ministry of Health, and pharmaceutical suppliers. Providers' stated preferences for the...

In this paper, the implications of applying the idea of gift exchange mechanism, inspired from Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theories, into a market-based multiagent system are explored. Our work is directed in the continuation of investigations by Knabe (2002), who addressed the formation of different organizations structures between providers in a profit-oriented market. We nevertheless scru...

The experience of low- and middle-income countries (LMC) with respect to regulation and legislation in the health sector is in marked contrast to that of Canada and Europe. It is suggested that the degree to which regulatory mechanisms can influence private sector activity in LMC is quite low. However, there has been little work done on exploring just how, and to what extent, these regulations ...

Many universities and other non-profit organizations started dial-up Internet access as a valueadded service to their respective communities. The implementation and maintenance of these services becomes a nontrivial task, requiring large annual budgets to keep these systems up and running. The mandate for these non-profit entities is to recover the costs of providing their value added services ...

Ridesharing is undoubtedly appealing from a sustainability perspective; however, profit optimization is very important for commercial providers. As such, ridesharing offers a valuable opportunity to garner profit by reducing the number of driver-miles that need to be paid for in order to serve the same set of passengers. In this paper, we study profit optimization for commercial ridesharing ser...