Drawing on an empirical study of public transport, this paper studies interactive value formation at the provider-customer interface, from a practice-theory perspective. In contrast to the bulk of previous research, it argues that interactive value formation is not only associated with value cocreation but also with value co-destruction. In addition, the paper also identifies five interaction v...

This paper studies the strategic interaction between a monopolistic seller of an information product and a set of potential buyers that compete in a downstream market. Our analysis illustrates that the nature and intensity of competition among the information provider’s customers play first-order roles in determining her optimal strategy. We show that when the customers view their actions as st...

We present an identity management scheme built into the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for identities that are as indelible as the blockchain itself. Moreover, we take advantage of Bitcoin’s decentralized nature to facilitate a shared control between users and identity providers, allowing users to directly manage their own identities, fluidly coordinating identities from different providers, even...

1 Department of Experimental Oncology, Istituto Nazionale Tumori IRCCS Fondazione Pascale, 80131 Napoli, Italy 2 Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Human Virology, Baltimore, MD 21201, USA 3Department of Research, International Prevention Research Institute, 69006 Lyon, France 4Department of Pathology, Istituto Nazionale Tumori IRCCS Fondazione Pascale, 80131 Napoli, Italy ...

Mobile cloud computing, which integrates the cloud computing techniques into the mobile environment, is regarded as one of the enabler technologies for 5G mobile wireless networks. There are many sporadic spare resources distributed within various devices in the networks, which can be used to support mobile cloud applications. However, these devices, with only a few spare resources, cannot supp...

14 of the world's 15 ‘oldest’ countries (largest percentage of people age 65 plus) are to be found in Europe. While E-Government is currently establishing as the most important public sector reform strategy in the EU (Lisbon Agenda), age is a factor which strongly affects EGovernment usage. Under the label of ‘E-Inclusion’ EU policies seeks to solve also age-related digital divide issues. This ...

This paper presents a system for real-time, open-domain question answering on the Web of documents written in Portuguese, prepared to handle factual questions and available as a freely accessible online service. In order to deliver candidate answers to input questions phrased in Portuguese, this system resorts to a number of shallow processing tools and question answering techniques that are sp...

Testing is the process of stimulating a system with inputs in order to reveal hidden parts of the system state. We consider a variant of the testing problem that was put forward in the model-based diagnosis literature, and consists of finding input patterns that definitely discriminate between different constraint-based system models. We show that this problem can be framed as a game played bet...

OBJECTIVES To explore and describe the views on clinical audit of healthcare purchasers and providers, and in particular the interaction between them, and hence to help the future development of an appropriate interaction between purchasers and providers. DESIGN Semistructured interviews. SETTING Four purchaser and provider pairings in the former Northern Region of the National Health Servi...