Application Abstract for Service Spotlights

Smart wellness services collect various types of lifelog data, such as the number of steps taken and sleep duration, via smart devices. However, most existing smart wellness services simply display each individual lifelog to users, limiting their ability to support overall user understanding. In this article, the authors develop a lifelogs-based daily wellness score (LDWS) to resolve such limitations by combining various lifelog data to calculate a score that represents overall daily health behaviors. LDWS was developed as part of a smart wellness service for college students in collaboration with an IT company. Lifelog data of 41 college students were collected through a four-week trial and were subsequently fitted to a random effects model. Based on the model estimates, LDWS was determined by linearly aggregating seven behavior variables. The utility of the developed LDWS was validated through a second trial of the service. The authors also discuss other potential uses of LDWS and the factors to be considered for developing a lifelogs-based wellness score for a smart wellness service.

Existing revenue management methods and heuristics rely on specific demand-side assumptions such as customers’ independent decisions over time. We relax the assumption that purchasing decisions depend only on the current price and are independent of previous prices of the same or similar products. On the contrary, we assume that customers’ decisions depend on the product’s past prices through a reference price. With this new dimension, a firm needs not only to manage its remaining capacity but also to control the reference price to maximize its expected future profit. In this situation, we show that some of the main analytical properties such as monotonicity or modularity of the firm’s value function no longer hold. Consequently, the effectiveness of existing heuristics that have been developed based on these properties become limited and might generate poor results. Examples of such heuristics are the bid price and the booking limit, which are popular methods of revenue management in practice. For the new setting, incorporating a reference price, we update the existing revenue management heuristics and measure their updated effectiveness. We use a comprehensive simulation study to illustrate our results.

In the context of today’s interconnected world, public higher education is confronted with a shift of its role from public good to public service, which is accompanied by new challenges in building and maintaining the viability of public universities. There is a vast literature on this topic, but there is not yet reported a systematic approach in modeling the basic steps of decision making and problem solving to be completed by a public university to remain viable. Starting from the concepts of service system, and consonance and resonance as key viability conditions, this paper proposes a discrete event model of the viability building and maintaining process in a generic public university organization. The model evolution is driven by events conditioned by internal, external, or mixed causes. Some of the uncontrollable events occurring in the process may drive the discrete evolution to disturbance rejection states, where specific recovery strategies are applied. If recovery is successful, disturbances may become sources of innovation. The discrete event model can be used as a theoretical and conceptual tool for building and testing instances of the viability building and maintaining processes in public universities, and also for refining academic evaluation criteria by the authorities.

The importance of technologies for services has been remarkably emphasized recently with the terms “digitalization” and “smart service systems.” Technologies, especially information and communications technologies, have been regarded as an important driver of innovating services, and various researchers of services and service systems have investigated the development of technology-assisted service systems and their methods. However, few studies report how to generalize and disseminate developed service systems and technologies for other service systems. This type of study is essential to expand the impact of the study on technology-assisted service systems on the industrial and societal levels. As our research question, we examined the necessary processes and deliverables to develop and disseminate technology-assisted service systems. We analyzed five cases of a service engineering research project in Japan that aimed at improving service industry productivity through disseminating developed technologies. We conducted semistructured interviews with the researchers responsible in each case. As a result, we clarified the generalization process through continuous codevelopment with stakeholders in the same or different service systems. We also specified a set of research outputs: technology, activity guideline, and application process, designated as a technological support model for a service system. The features of these outputs can be emphasized by categorizing them into three types: knowledge-worker support model, organization management support model, and association management support model. These processes and outputs provide a practical guideline for developing and disseminating technology-assisted service systems effectively.

A growing amount of travel is booked through third-party Internet booking sites where the booking commission the hotels are charged is subject to negotiation. The fee varies, depending, among other...

The sustained success of variable pricing for revenue management (RM) is dependent on the creation of appropriate price points at which to sell a given product offering. To date, few studies have considered the impact of nonprice information on consumer reaction to price, and none have investigated the relative weights that consumers assign to price and the nonprice information available to them during different phases of the purchase choice process. This exploratory study uses a combination of eye tracking and retrospective think-aloud (RTA) interviews to examine how consumers consider the price and nonprice content generated by the firm and the nonprice information generated by other consumers during two distinct phases of the online choice process: browsing and deliberation. This study’s findings suggest that during browsing, firm-generated content appears to be very influential, particularly the image selected to represent the property in search results. Both firm-generated and user-generated content play a role in hotel choice during deliberation, with the interplay among several types of information being an important indication of value for consumers.