Consumer acceptance of RFID-enabled services: a model of multiple attitudes,perceived system characteristics and individual traits

The introduction of emerging technologies in retailing and their infusion in the service encounter necessitates research to better understand consumer attitudes towards the usage of technology in service delivery systems. The capability of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to automatically and uniquely identify products makes this technology promising as an enabler of innovative consumer services. However there is limited research on how consumers perceive the RFID-enabled service systems. The authors develop and empirically test a model that focuses on consumer attitudes towards technology-based services. Based on the pre-prototype user acceptance framework and using RFID as a focal technology, the proposed model includes a hierarchy of three distinct consumer attitudes: towards the general service concept, towards the general technology-based service application and towards the RFID-enabled service. Perceived system characteristics as well as personality traits are included in the model. The partial least squares method of structural equation modelling is used to analyse 575 questionnaires collected in two consumer surveys in Greece (n=173) and Ireland (N=402). The results of the study show that consumer attitude towards RFID-enabled services in retailing can be modelled as a confluence of multiple attitudes. The results also indicate that perceived system-related factors – such as performance and effort expectancy – as well as individual traits – such as technology anxiety and information privacy concern – affect consumer attitude towards technology-based and RFID-enabled services, respectively.     

Electronic business adoption by European firms: a cross-country assessment of the facilitators and inhibitors

In this study, we developed a conceptual model for studying the adoption of electronic business (e-business or EB) at the firm level, incorporating six adoption facilitators and inhibitors, based on the technology–organization–environment theoretical framework. Survey data from 3100 businesses and 7500 consumers in eight European countries were used to test the proposed adoption model. We conducted confirmatory factor analysis to assess the reliability and validity of constructs. To examine whether adoption patterns differ across different e-business environments, we divided the full sample into high EB-intensity and low EB-intensity countries. After controlling for variations of industry and country effects, the fitted logit models demonstrated four findings: (1) Technology competence, firm scope and size, consumer readiness, and competitive pressure are significant adoption drivers, while lack of trading partner readiness is a significant adoption inhibitor. (2) As EB-intensity increases, two environmental factors – consumer readiness and lack of trading partner readiness – become less important, while competitive pressure remains significant. (3) In high EB-intensity countries, e-business is no longer a phenomenon dominated by large firms; as more and more firms engage in e-business, network effect works to the advantage of small firms. (4) Firms are more cautious in adopting e-business in high EB-intensity countries – it seems to suggest that the more informed firms are less aggressive in adopting e-business, a somehow surprising result. Explanations and implications are offered.     

Hedaquin: A Reputation-based Health Data Quality Indicator

A number of applications based on personal health records (PHRs) are emerging in the field of health care and wellness. PHRs empower patients by giving them control over their health data. Health data for PHRs can be supplied by patients, wellness providers and health care providers. Health care providers may use the PHRs to provide medical care. Unfortunately, the quality of the health data cannot be guaranteed in all cases (e.g. consider cases where non-professionals such as patients and wellness providers supplied the data).To address this problem, we present in this paper Hedaquin, a system that provides health care professionals with an indication of the quality of health data in a PHR. This indication is based on the reputation of the supplier and on metadata provided by measurement devices. The proposed reputation system mimics the way trust in health data and their suppliers is built in the real world.Hedaquin uses the Beta reputation system as a starting point and extends it in several directions to cover specific PHR requirements. Firstly, Hedaquin supports the automatic calculation of a rating based on a repeated measurement. Secondly, certificates for the user such as diplomas are taken into account. Thirdly, Hedaquin calculates reputation for different scopes in order to discriminate among different tasks the suppliers of health data can perform. Finally, the time difference between the ratings and the calculation of the reputation influences the weight that is given to a rating.     

Older adults’ perceptions of usefulness of personal health records

Electronic personal health records (PHRs) have the potential to both make health information more accessible to patients and function as a decision-support system for patients managing chronic conditions. Age-related changes in cognition may make traditional strategies of integrating and understanding existing (i.e., paper-based) health information more difficult for older adults. The centralized and integrated nature of health information, as well as the long-term tracking capabilities present in many PHRs, may be especially beneficial for older patients’ management of health. However, older adults tend to be late adopters of technology and may be hesitant to adopt a PHR if the benefits are not made clear (perceived usefulness). Toward the design of a useful PHR, a needs analysis was conducted to determine how people currently manage their health information, what they perceive as useful, and to identify any unmet needs. This paper describes two qualitative studies examining the health information needs of both younger and older adults. The first study used a 2-week diary methodology to examine everyday health questions or concerns, while the second study examined maintenance of health information and perceptions of PHRs through the use of a three-part interview. User’s perceptions of the usefulness of PHRs are provided as recommendations for the design of e-health technology, especially those targeted for older adult healthcare consumers. The results suggest that both older and younger adults would deem a PHR useful if it provides memory support in the form of reminders, provides tools to aid in comprehension of one’s health concerns, is interactive and provides automatic functions, and is highly accessible to authorized users, yet one’s information is kept secure and private.     

Towards an understanding of the behavioral intention to use 3G mobile value-added services

As profit margins gradually decline, and market competition becomes increasingly intensive, 3G telecom operators must provide various mobile value-added services, as well as traditional voice services, to attract new subscribers and retain old ones. However, for many 3G mobile value-added services, whether ARPU (average revenue per user) can be effectively enhanced depends on the consumer behavioral intentions. Therefore, this study uses the Technology Acceptance Model as the foundation and incorporate personal innovativeness and perceived cost to further understand consumer’s behavioral intention to use 3G mobile value-added services. The following conclusions can be reached from the research findings: (1) consumer usage rate of current 3G value-added services remains low; (2) increased personal innovativeness will directly enhance the perceived ease of use of 3G mobile value-added services; (3) the perceived usefulness is enhanced when consumers perceive higher ease of use of value-added services; (4) perceived usefulness has the strongest effect on consumer attitude, followed by perceived ease of use and perceived cost, and (5) the most important factor in increasing consumer’s behavioral intention to use 3G mobile value-added services is attitude, followed by perceived ease of use, perceived cost and perceived usefulness. Results of this study provide a valuable reference for service providers to develop mobile value-added services.     

Multimedia mobile application e-commerce service satisfaction

Previous research on e-commerce through multimedia mobile applications primarily focused on the relationships between e-service factors and positive customer behavior. However, these studies did not consider the consumer purchasing decision process sufficiently to develop firms’ strategic priorities in the context of e-commerce services through multimedia mobile applications. To fill this gap, we conducted a choice-based conjoint analysis (CBCA) to identify the preferences for each attribute and the interaction effects between each pair of attributes related to the purchasing decision, and used an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) analysis to calculate the overall priorities for every sub-criterion and partial priorities for each main criterion. The main findings from the integrated CBCA and AHP are that consumers must be able to fulfill their most basic needs through multimedia mobile applications’ e-commerce service, e-commerce service providers using multimedia mobile applications should enhance their existing advantages to complement their shortcomings, and e-commerce service providers besides social commerce operators should change their business structures to adapt to the new e-commerce environment. We also discuss the main contributions and implications to improve e-commerce service satisfaction and strategic decision-making.

     

公平视角下全渠道服务商定价和服务能力分配策略

随着移动互联网的发展,基于本地服务的全渠道运营模式被广大服务运营商和消费者所接受.对于有限服务能力的服务商在全渠道运营的过程中,需要考虑其服务能力在不同渠道中的公平分配.针对同时运营实体和O2O渠道的服务商进行研究,探索考虑公平的服务商不同分配机制下的渠道定价及分配策略的选择.通过消费者效用模型的构建,刻画消费者的渠道...     

How do tax compliance labels impact sharing platform consumers? An empirical study on the interplay of trust,moral, and intention to book

The platform economy has generated various new and highly successful business models. However, certain models facilitate tax evasion for service providers on their income earned on these platforms. While tax evasion contradicts the pro-social claim of many sharing platforms, it is unclear whether a provider’s tax honesty constitutes a value for consumers at all. This study investigates the role of tax compliance for platform users by employing an online experiment (\(n=286\)). The results indicate that consumers perceive providers’ tax compliance and consider it as a trust-enhancing signal. In further analysis, we find that consumers’ moral norms moderate both the signal’s trust-building effect as well as the relation between trust and transaction intention. In light of recent policy debates around taxing the platform economy, this study provides valuable practical insights for tax legislators.

     

Service licensing: conceptualization, formalization, and expression

Service licensing enables a broader usage of services and a means for designing business strategies and relationships. A service license describes the terms and conditions that permit the use of and access to a service, in a machine interpretable way, which services can understand. The distribution of services spanning across organizational boundaries raises problems related to intellectual value that are less explored in service-oriented research. Being a way to manage the rights between service consumers and service providers, licenses become significant in services. As the nature of services differs significantly from traditional software and components, services prevent the direct adoption of software and component licenses. The concept of preserving certain rights of owner and presenting certain rights to consumer, addressed by service licensing, is incipient in the field of service-oriented computing. We propose a formalization of licensing clauses for an unambiguous definition of a service license. We extend the Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of service licensing, in a machine interpretable way. We illustrate the concepts of service licensing based on a case study of service license compliance verification in a real world scenario.     

Automating identification of services and their variability for product lines using NSGA-II

Architecture-level business services are identified based on business processes; and likewise, in service-oriented product lines, identifying the domain architecture-level business services and their variability is preferred to be based on business processes and their variability. Identification of business services for a product line satisfying a set of given design metrics (such as cohesion and coupling) is extremely difficult for a domain architect, since there are many product configurations for which the services must be proper at the same time. This means that the identified services must have proper values for n metrics in m different configurations at the same time. The problem becomes more serious when there are high degrees of variability and complexity embedded in the business processes that are the basis for service identification.We contribute to solve the multi-objective optimization problem of identifying business services for a product line by partitioning the graph of a business process variability model utilizing Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II. The service specification is achieved based on the results of the partitioning. The variability of the services is then determined in terms of mandatory and optional services as well as variability relationships, which are all represented in a Service Variability Model. The method was empirically evaluated through experimentation, and showed proper levels of reusability and variability. Furthermore, the resulting models were fully consistent.     

Trust trumps concern: findings from a seven-country study on consumer consent to ‘digital native’ vs. ‘digital immigrant’ service providers

Many service providers (e.g. mobile network operators) want to turn their business into fully digitalised regimes and offer personalised services. To do so they need access to the consumers’ personal data and must explicitly ask consumers for consent. In this cross-national study, including representative samples from seven countries covering Scandinavia, Central-Eastern Europe and South-Eastern Asia, we investigate the effect of trust vs. privacy concerns and the moderating impact of culture when consents are requested. The study shows that trust in service provider has stronger impact on consent giving than privacy concerns, and indicates that ‘digital native’ more than ‘digital immigrant’ providers should focus on trust building activities when they enter countries with an individualistic culture. The analyses were made within a PLS-SEM framework.     

QoS aggregation for service orchestrations based on workflow pattern rules and MCDM method: evaluation at design time and runtime

Service consumers satisfaction is considered today as one of the main concern to be ensured by service providers, especially with the spread of concurrency and the increase of functionally equivalent services. This satisfaction is closely related to quality of service (QoS) perceived by service consumers. In this context, we propose an approach to determine the satisfaction degree corresponding to the QoS of service-based applications, with regard to service consumers’ QoS expectations. Our approach is based on a preference model, which is built only on the basis of service consumer’s provided information. This preference model is also based on the 2-additive Choquet operator that takes into account preferential dependencies. In this paper, we target both design time and runtime aggregation of QoS of service-based applications.     

POYRAZ: CONTEXT-AWARE SERVICE SELECTION UNDER DECEPTION

The increasing number of service providers on the Web makes it challenging to select a provider for a specific service demand. Each service consumer has different expectations for a given service in different contexts, so the selection process should be consumer-oriented and context-dependent. Current approaches for service selection typically have consumers receive ratings of providers from other consumers, where the ratings reflect the consumers' overall subjective opinions. This may be misleading if consumers have different contexts and satisfaction criteria. In this paper, we propose that consumers objectively record their experiences, using an ontology to capture subtle details. This can then be interpreted by consumers according to their own criteria and contexts. We then integrate a method for addressing consumers who lie about their experiences, filtering them out during service selection. We demonstrate the value of our approach through experiments comparing our model with three recent rating-based service selection models. Our experiments show that using the proposed approach, service consumers can select the service providers for their needs more accurately even if the consumers have different criteria, they change the contexts of their service demands over time, or a significant portion of them are liars.     

Consumer-centric QoS-aware selection of web services

There exist many web services which exhibit similar functional characteristics. It is imperative to provide service consumers with facilities for selecting required web services according to their non-functional characteristics or quality of service (QoS). However, the selection process is greatly complicated by the distinct views of service providers and consumers on the services QoS. For instance, they may have distinct views of the service reliability—wherein a consumer considers that a service is reliable if its success rate is higher than 99%, while a provider may consider its service as reliable if its success rate is higher than 90%. The aim of this paper is to resolve such conflicts and to ensure consensus on the QoS characteristics in the selection of web services. It proposes a QoS Consensus Moderation Approach (QCMA) in order to perform QoS consensus and to alleviate the differences on QoS characteristics in the selection of web services. The proposed approach is implemented as a prototype tool and is tested on a case study of a hotel booking web service. Experimental results show that the proposed approach greatly improves the service selection process in a dynamic and uncertain environment of web services.     

Mining health-risk factors using PHR similarity in a hybrid P2P network

In an era of many diseases and increased longevity, more attention has been paid to chronic diseases that require constant health care. Under this circumstance, the development of research and development (R&D) for smart-device-based constant health care has drawn great attention. With the emergence of wearable devices, personal health devices (PHDs), and smartphones, various contents for constant health care have been developed. By using these devices, the users are able to collect personal health records (PHRs) that include data such as activity amount, heart rate, stress, and blood sugar. The range of the collected PHRs can be limited depending on the equipment or the surrounding environment. To overcome this problem, it is necessary to make a comparison with similar users in a cluster. Also, it is necessary to provide a service that can analyze and visually display the collected personal-health information. In this paper, we propose the mining of health-risk factors using the PHR similarity in a hybrid P2P network. This is a method of predicting a user’s health status using similarity-based data mining, where the PHRs are employed in a hybrid P2P environment consisting of a peer, a server, and a gateway. In a hybrid P2P environment, a user receives feedback on the result of a structured-data analysis. A peer searches for a different peer and gateway through a server and exchanges information. Depending on the data type, the PHR is divided into medical health examination, self-diagnosis, and personal-health data. The medical health examination contains the personal-health data that are generated regularly by a medical institution. Self-diagnosis represents the data of mental health, pains, and fatigue that can be changed often but cannot be collected by devices. Personal-health data mean the data that can be collected by individuals in everyday life. For the PHR-data analysis, an index is given to each attribute, and preprocessing is performed after a binary-code conversion. To predict a user’s health status, the PHR data are clustered on the basis of similarity in a hybrid P2P environment. The similarity between a user’s PHR and a PHR that is searched for in the network is measured. After the measurement, an index is given to the PHR that meets the minimum similarity and the PHR is incorporated into a Similarity PHR Group. The Similarity PHR Group flexibly changes depending on a user’s PHR status and the statuses of the users who have accessed the hybrid P2P network. A representative value of the Similarity PHR Group is extracted and is then compared with the user’s PHR to judge the user’s health status. The proposed method is suitable for a smart health service for chronic diseases requiring constant care, elderly health, and aftercare. This is a user-oriented health-care and promotion service wherein a user’s health status can be predicted through the mining of the health-risk factors of PHRs.     

A Conversational Approach to the Interaction With Web Services

The emerging standards for the specification of Web Services support the publication of the static interfaces of the operations they may execute. However, little attention is paid to the management of long-lasting interactions between the service providers and their consumers. Although this is not an issue in the case of "one-shot" services, it challenges the provision of services requiring the exchange of multiple messages between the business partners. In this article, we present a conversational model supporting the management of long-lasting interactions where several messages have to be exchanged before the service is completed. Our model aims at facilitating the consumers during the service invocation because in this way the establishment of short-term business relations can be simplified. To this extent, we provide a computational framework that can be exploited to manage a conversation between the consumer and the service provider. Our framework is inspired from the research developed in Computational Linguistics and in the area of Multi-Agent Systems to manage human-to-computer and agent-to-agent dialog. However, we employ techniques suitable to comply with the emerging Web Service standards and with the scalability requirements of the Internet.     

Perceived quality factors of location-based apps on trust,perceived privacy risk,and continuous usage intention

Numerous location-based services (LBS) studies have suggested that the risk of disclosing personal privacy hinders consumers from adopting LBS, whereas scant attention has focused on clarifying how to mitigate the perceived privacy risk of using LBS. This quantitative study focuses on the effects of consumer quality perceptions (i.e. information quality, system quality, and service quality) on their trust in LBS, which consequently affects perceived privacy risk and continued usage intention towards LBS. Research data were collected through a market survey website; 1399 valid questionnaires were collected. Structural equation modelling analysis was applied to the data. The results revealed that information quality, system quality, and service quality were positively related to perceived trust. Perceived trust also correlated negatively with perceived privacy risk, but positively with continued usage intention. A managerial implication drawn from the findings is that LBS providers should develop more useful user interfaces or provide timely, personalised services to reduce perceived privacy risk and strengthen LBS continued usage intention.     

Towards certified open data in digital service ecosystems

The opportunities of open data have been recently recognized among companies in different domains. Digital service providers have increasingly been interested in the possibilities of innovating new ideas and services around open data. Digital service ecosystems provide several advantages for service developers, enabling the service co-innovation and co-creation among ecosystem members utilizing and sharing common assets and knowledge. The utilization of open data in digital services requires new innovation practices, service development models, and a collaboration environment. These can be provided by the ecosystem. However, since open data can be almost anything and originate from different kinds of data sources, the quality of data becomes the key issue. The new challenge for service providers is how to guarantee the quality of open data. In the ecosystems, uncertain data quality poses major challenges. The main contribution of this paper is the concept of the Evolvable Open Data based digital service Ecosystem (EODE), which defines the kinds of knowledge and services that are required for validating open data in digital service ecosystems. Thus, the EODE provides business potential for open data and digital service providers, as well as other actors around open data. The ecosystem capability model, knowledge management models, and the taxonomy of services to support the open data quality certification are described. Data quality certification confirms that the open data is trustworthy and its quality is good enough to be accepted for the usage of the ecosystem’s services. The five-phase open data quality certification process, according to which open data is brought to the ecosystem and certified for the usage of the digital service ecosystem members using the knowledge models and support services of the ecosystem, is also described. The initial experiences of the still ongoing validation steps are summarized, and the concept limitations and future development targets are identified.     

一种考虑服务质量的服务发现机制

服务发现是服务框架中联系消费者和提供者的重要环节。提出了一种考虑服务质量的服务发现机制（QSCD)。QSCD根据消费者的消费历史，考虑了消费者对服务质量的要求，在消费者本地建立一个服务发现机构。并在QSCD引入服务预约和服务社区等概念，对该机制进行了扩展。它作为对已有服务发现机制的补充，可提高发现的速度。