Maintaining vs. milking good reputation when customer feedback is inaccurate.

Both Quantity and Quality of Antenatal Care Matter for Child Birthweight: An Analysis of Nationally Representative Data From Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan

For the last decade, the areas of e-business and e-service have expanded rapidly. Service oriented architecture (SOA) is introduced to create and execute business process on the Web. In SOA, the importance of managing the reputation ofservices has emerged. Thus, there has been much research to evaluate and manage the reputation of services. This paper proposes the context-aware distributed reputation management system (C-DRMS) to evaluate and manage the reputation of services in terms of different context parameters. In this research framework, service consumer (user) and service provider (server) expose their context information during service request to the broker that hosts them. When a broker delivers the reputation of the service to a user, it gathers reputation data from its local database and neighbor brokers' databases, aggregates them and provides the reputation to the user, based on context similarity between the userpsilas context and the context with which the reputation is stored in the database. The broker maintains the reputation based on the feedback of service consumption from its users, by readjusting it with the context similarity between a user's context and the server's context.

Demand Postponement with Strategic Service Customers

Demand Postponement with Strategic Service Customers

Residential and small business customers often have need for high instantaneous download throughput for their Internet transactions which can exceed the throughput provided by the customer's Internet Service Provider (ISP). At the same time, these peak demand periods are relatively brief and may constitute only a few hours a day. During the non-peak periods, these customers have an unused Internet capacity that could be used by others. In this work, we propose and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation system for wireless routers. This system allows neighboring users to form bandwidth pools from the users' connections to their ISPs, allowing users to achieve aggregated instantaneous bandwidth. By transparently segmenting large Web requests, our approach avoids changes to the users' machines, ISPs, or remote servers. We implement and evaluate such a system and discuss related issues.

<h3>Background</h3> Sustainable diets can help individuals to reduce their environmental footprint and potentially eat more healthily. However, most studies tend to focus on the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) in terms of the environmental impact and dietary cost is not considered. Understanding the sociodemographic determinants of sustainable diets can help in creating feasible suggestions for improvement. <h3>Methods</h3> Dietary information from the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) years 2014–2017 (adults, N = 2165) was used. An average diet was estimated for each participant and a diet quality score. The environmental footprints in terms of GHGE, land use and freshwater withdrawals and the dietary cost were calculated by linking all the consumed food items to their respective values from Poore and Nemecek, 2018 dataset. Diets were classified based on whether they had an acceptable diet quality and whether their environmental footprint and cost was below the median value respectively. Multinomial logistic regression models were used to identify associations between the aspects of diet sustainability and the socio-demographic variables. <h3>Results</h3> Men were more likely to consume a diet that was high in GHGE and low quality than a diet of low GHGE and high quality compared to women with odds ratio (OR) 2.35 and 95% confidence intervals (CI) 1.79, 3.08. Vegetarians were more likely to adhere to a diet of low GHGE and high quality than a diet high in GHGE and low quality compared to non-vegetarians with OR 1.78 (95% CI 0.87, 2.65). People aged 45–65 were more likely to consume a diet of higher cost and higher diet quality than younger adults with OR 1.98 (95% CI 1.19, 3.29). Professionals and people in managerial positions were more likely to consume a diet of low quality and high in freshwater withdrawals than those in lower level occupations with OR 1.82 (95% CI 1.21, 2.74). People with higher qualifications were more likely to have a diet of higher GHGE and low diet quality compared to people with no occupation with OR 1.57 (95% CI 0.97, 2.55). <h3>Conclusion</h3> Sociodemographic variables are associated with the quality and sustainability of the diet. Employment status and qualifications are positively associated with higher environmental footprint diets across all indicators and cost, whereas women and vegetarians have lower environmental impact diets and cost. Older age groups were associated with higher cost and better quality. Future interventions could help direct individuals to adopt healthier and more sustainable diets.

Alliances Between Competitors and Consumer Information

A reputation service is an essential part of a reputation system, which collects, distributes, and aggregates feedback about service providers' past behaviour. The feedback, as a score, is given interactively or by a user or is derived from a monitoring process automatically. The reputation service accommodates for each service provider an accumulated score as its reputation, which is produced by following a reputation algorithm. Once the reputation of an entity on Internet is built, it can then be used for the information security purposes, such as stopping the user with bad reputation having access to a resource of networks, or not allowing the service with bad reputation to access other trustworthy resources. This paper presents a reputation service, which is built as an independent web service and can be remotely invoked. It also addresses how the reputation of an entity can be used for access control purposes.

BackgroundThere are both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that design and execution factors are associated with bias in controlled trials. Statistically significant moderator effects, such as the effect of trial quality on treatment effect sizes, are rarely detected in individual meta-analyses, and evidence from meta-epidemiological datasets is inconsistent. The reasons for the disconnect between theory and empirical observation are unclear. The study objective was to explore the power to detect study level moderator effects in meta-analyses.MethodsWe generated meta-analyses using Monte-Carlo simulations and investigated the effect of number of trials, trial sample size, moderator effect size, heterogeneity, and moderator distribution on power to detect moderator effects. The simulations provide a reference guide for investigators to estimate power when planning meta-regressions.ResultsThe power to detect moderator effects in meta-analyses, for example, effects of study quality on effect sizes, is largely determined by the degree of residual heterogeneity present in the dataset (noise not explained by the moderator). Larger trial sample sizes increase power only when residual heterogeneity is low. A large number of trials or low residual heterogeneity are necessary to detect effects. When the proportion of the moderator is not equal (for example, 25% ‘high quality’, 75% ‘low quality’ trials), power of 80% was rarely achieved in investigated scenarios. Application to an empirical meta-epidemiological dataset with substantial heterogeneity (I2 = 92%, τ2 = 0.285) estimated >200 trials are needed for a power of 80% to show a statistically significant result, even for a substantial moderator effect (0.2), and the number of trials with the less common feature (for example, few ‘high quality’ studies) affects power extensively.ConclusionsAlthough study characteristics, such as trial quality, may explain some proportion of heterogeneity across study results in meta-analyses, residual heterogeneity is a crucial factor in determining when associations between moderator variables and effect sizes can be statistically detected. Detecting moderator effects requires more powerful analyses than are employed in most published investigations; hence negative findings should not be considered evidence of a lack of effect, and investigations are not hypothesis-proving unless power calculations show sufficient ability to detect effects.

Foams are used routinely worldwide to divert acid in well-stimulation treatments and on a pilot basis to divert gas flow in improved-oil-recovery projects. The complexity of foam behavior and apparent contradictions between foam studies has bedeviled attempts to understand foams and design effective field treatments. In 1992 Osterloh and Jante[1] identified two distinct foam-flow regimes: a high-quality (dry) regime in which steady-state pressure gradient is independent of gas flow rate, and a low-quality (wet) regime, in which pressure gradient is independent of liquid flow rate. New data for foam with a variety of porous media and surfactant formulations, over a range of flow rates, show this behavior to be general. In each regime foam behavior is dominated by a single mechanism: at high qualities by capillary pressure and coalescence, and at low qualities by bubble trapping and mobilization. A new, unified model based on these insights unites foam behavior in acid well stimulation and gas-diversion IOR and reconciles apparently contradictory data. This model correlates the effects of parameters like rock permeability and surfactant formulation on foam behavior in the two flow regimes and on the transition between the two regimes. A variety of laboratory data, including bubble sizes, support the model assumptions. Implications of these results for design of foam processes for IOR and acid diversion are discussed. These insights can guide the selection of foam formulation and injection quality for foam applications.

SummaryFoams are routinely used worldwide to divert acid in well-stimulation treatments, and to divert gas flow in improved oil recovery (IOR) projects on a pilot basis. The complexity of foam behavior and the apparent contradictions among foam studies have bedeviled attempts to understand foams and to design effective field treatments.In 1992, Osterloh and Jante1 identified two distinct foam-flow regimes: a high-quality (dry) regime, in which the steady-state pressure gradient is independent of the gas flow rate, and a low-quality (wet) regime, in which the pressure gradient is independent of the liquid flow rate. New data for strong foams in a variety of porous media, with various surfactant formulations, and over a range of flow rates, show this behavior to be general. In each regime, foam behavior is dominated by a single mechanism: at high qualities by capillary pressure and coalescence, and at low qualities by bubble trapping and mobilization. Based on these insights, a new, unified model unites foam behavior in acid-well stimulation and gasdiversion IOR and reconciles apparently contradictory data. This model correlates the effects of parameters, such as rock permeability and surfactant formulation, on foam behavior in the two flow regimes and on the transition between the two regimes. A variety of laboratory data supports the model's assumptions.The implications of these results for designing foam processes for IOR and acid diversion are discussed. These insights can guide the selection of foam formulation and injection quality for foam applications.

Web-based systems that establish reputation are central to the viability of many electronic markets. We present theory that identifies the different dimensions of online reputation and characterizes their influence on the pricing power of sellers. We provide evidence that existing, numeric reputation scores conceal important seller-specific dimensions of reputation and we validate our theory further by proposing a new text mining technique that identifies and quantitatively evaluates further dimensions of importance in reputation profiles. We also suggest that the buyer-seller network contains critical reputation information that we can further exploit to improve the design of a reputation mechanism. Our experimental evaluation validates the predictions of our model using a new data set containing over 12,000 transactions for consumer software on Amazon.com's online secondary marketplace. This paper is the first attempt to integrate econometric methods and text and link mining techniques towards a more complete analysis of the information captured by reputation systems, and it presents new evidence of the importance of their effective and judicious design.

An internet service provider (ISP) tries to maximize profit by choosing an appropriate price for an offered service. In this paper, a system of two identical ISPs is considered. When ISPs independently choose a price to charge to maximize profit and each ISP repeatedly tries to improve profit by changing the price till no further improvements are possible, they may reach an equilibrium called the Nash equilibrium. Another strategy is that one ISP announces an appropriate price in advance and the other ISP chooses the best response strategy. This leads to Stackelberg competition. Both these strategies are compared in the paper. In this paper, it is assumed that few clients have access to multiple ISPs by using multi-SIM handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets. The clients who have access to multiple-ISPs choose an appropriate ISP for service based on the price of the service. The clients who have access to only one ISP, have no choice but to take service from the ISP. Simulations show that the ISP who announces an appropriate price in advance is likely to do better as compared to the ISP who decides the price later after observing the price of the announcer. Simulations also show that announcing an appropriate price in advance is better instead of independently deciding the price which may lead to a Nash equilibrium in terms of profit of the ISPs and quality of service provided to the clients.

&lt;span&gt;In this paper, a modification model for single-link reverse charging of internet is formed on a multi-link wireless network. The pricing scheme also takes into account the base costs and quality of services provided by the service provider. Bit error rate (BER) was utilized as one of the well-known quality of service (QoS) attribute that can guarantee best performance for internet service provider (ISP) and users. The base price is determined as a decision variable to help ISP to maximize profit. This optimization model can be solved using the LINGO 13.0 program to gain optimal values. The computational results show that by setting costs as constants and service quality as variables, optimal results are obtained for ISPs. This can make ISP considerations in determining the base price that can benefit the ISP and according to the services provided&lt;/span&gt;.

The study is aimed to find out the influencing factors when consumers decide to choose products with low quality. The result indicates that major considered factors should be short life cycle, low quality, design, price and purchase intention, while price be considered as the one which has significant effect on consumers’ choices of accepting low quality, as well as product design. Most companies put the market share at the vital position, in traditional commercial thinking, high quality always means that products will be accepted by most customers; but now it is totally different. We take fast fashion industry and mobile phone industry as examples and choose fsQCA as the methodology to analyses the relationship between variable and result. Most of the customers are pursuing for high quality with low price (Dodds et al., 1991; Alfred, 2013; Shirai, 2015). But the companies are difficult to make the high quality products have low price. The companies can have the high quality advantage. However, quality is not the only factor to make the products with high price, design, corporate culture and brand can also be the factors (Homburg et al., 2015). How to make the consumers accept the low quality in short lifecycle product (e.g. fast fashion or high-tech industry), which means consumers may purchase new product to replace the old one before it has problems. In our study, we collect these data from customers via questionnaire. And use fsQCA to analyze the relationship between price, design and short lifecycle, all these influencing factors and customer purchase intention on low quality product. And we have some findings. Sometimes, low quality products can help companies achieve success by bringing income and satisfy consumers’ needs of goods and services in affordable price. From company’s aspect, low quality products are more affordable than those of high quality, so these products will win larger market share and promote fast fashion items to sell fast. While customers sometimes demand more products with good design, at the same time, they cannot bear the expensive items, low quality products can achieve balanced between demands and consuming ability. This means both companies and customers can get win-win situation.