Higher-education institutions may be skittish about the uncertainties associated with innovative uses of information technology to build learning communities. But a growing collection of external providers—mainly proprietary, for-profit institutions—are embracing them. A brief review of these external providers can yield several insights for higher education, allowing them to size up the compet...

Software as a Service (SaaS) provides access to applications to end users over the Internet without upfront investment in infrastructure and software. To serve their customers, SaaS providers utilise resources of internal data centres or rent resources from a public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. In-house hosting can increase administration and maintenance costs whereas renting fr...

ABstRAct Constant renewal of the self-image and self-knowledge of the organisation becomes part of the day-today knowledge-in-use of front-line practitioners. The Network Enterprise is a model of business conducted by shifting alliances of partners developing innovative products and processes in close collaboration with their clients. Organisations abandon the concept of a central product, rede...

This paper develops a game theory model of a service-oriented Internet in which profit-maximizing service providers provide substitutable (but not identical) services and compete with the quantities of services in a Cournot-Nash manner, whereas the network transport providers, which transport the services to the users at the demand markets, and are also profit-maximizers, compete with prices in...

Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular and has received considerable attention recently. As a new kind of Information Technology (IT) commercial model, understanding the economics of cloud computing becomes critically important. From the cloud service providers’ perspective, profit maximization is the top issue for them. Because a multi-server system is devoted to serving one type of...

Profit is the main participation incentive for social network providers. Its reliance on user profiles, built from a wealth of voluntarily revealed personal information, exposes users to a variety of privacy vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose to take first steps toward addressing the conflict between profit and privacy in geosocial networks. We introduce PROFILR , a framework for constr...

Could computing service providers have to ensure that the service applications, cloud software, and the physical location of the cloud are secure. Furthermore, providers need to ensure that the service is secure on the client’s side of the system. To examine the client side security level we build economic models that consider the tradeoffs between system usability and client side security rest...

We investigate nongovernment public service providers within an agent-based computational model of bureaucrats, citizens, and elected officials. Our analysis explores the relationships of all four types of agents in a single, dynamic model. Specifically, we focus on the delivery of public goods to the citizenry through elected officials and bureaucrats. In our computational model citizens have ...

BACKGROUND Aging in place is the crucial object of long-term care policy worldwide. Approximately 15.6-19.4% of people aged 15 or above live with a disability, and 15.3% of them have moderate or severe disabilities. The allocation of home nursing care services is therefore an important issue. Service providers in Taiwan vary substantially across regions, and between rural and urban areas. There...