Product-service systems (PSSs) have been highlighted as a prevailing trend for manufacturers to survive the modern era of tough competition in their industries. Despite the importance of the customer in such systems, previous studies offer little in terms of evaluating new PSS concepts from the customers’ perspective. To fill this academic lacuna, this paper proposes a method for evaluating suc...

The full worth of distributed generation systems must be measured not only by the impact on the customer, but also by DG’s impact on the grid and surrounding market participants. A case study comparing customer incentives created by utility rates with the real-time prices market in New England provides a new model to quantify the value of customer peak shaving with distributed generation techno...

In the recent times, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become one of the most dynamic topics of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), both in the academia and the market. This popularity is indeed a result of the promising features offered by CRM. All the studies to date have highlighted elements associated with CRM success by studying its adoption and implementation in the...

Information Technology enabled Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a growing phenomenon yet little research has been conducted to understand the factors that determine its appropriateness for organisations. A framework that considers the decision from the perspective of the transaction, the organisation and its context is outlined. The usefulness of that framework is then assessed using a cas...

Customers' experiential value is based on holistic experience customers would have when they interact with a product/service. Experiential value is defined as " relativistic preference characterizing a subject's experience with some object " (Holbrook, 1994). Internet is characterized for interactivity and it should have a role in customers' experiential value. Therefore, this research investig...

Currently, the majority of Chinese online consumers paid more attention to price and service quality. This paper studied the Price and Service competition in E-commerce of China. A price game within two online business companies is used in this paper. This study shows that the product's utility to a customer has a great influence on decision making of the two online business companies. As the p...

In electronic commerce on the Internet, a customer can choose among several competitive suppliers, but because of the nature of the Internet, the reliability and trustworthiness of suppliers may vary signi cantly. The customer's goal is to maximize its utility, by minimizing the expense required to ful ll its request, and maximizing its probability of success by some deadline. To this end, the ...

Excerpt] The purpose of this chapter is to present a model that integrates customer preferences and service design. In response to the need for interdisciplinary service management research, we present a framework that specifies the key elements of an integrated market utility-based model (MUM) and a method for determining optimal service designs based on customer needs and preferences. We also...