Service provider

About: Service provider is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 55107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 894381 citations. The topic is also known as: external service provider & internal service provider.

Anonymous Usage of Location-Based Services Through Spatial and Temporal Cloaking

Abstract: Advances in sensing and tracking technology enable location-based applications but they also create significant privacy risks. Anonymity can provide a high degree of privacy, save service users from dealing with service providers’ privacy policies, and reduce the service providers’ requirements for safeguarding private information. However, guaranteeing anonymous usage of location-based services requires that the precise location information transmitted by a user cannot be easily used to re-identify the subject. This paper presents a middleware architecture and algorithms that can be used by a centralized location broker service. The adaptive algorithms adjust the resolution of location information along spatial or temporal dimensions to meet specified anonymity constraints based on the entities who may be using location services within a given area. Using a model based on automotive traffic counts and cartographic material, we estimate the realistically expected spatial resolution for different anonymity constraints. The median resolution generated by our algorithms is 125 meters. Thus, anonymous location-based requests for urban areas would have the same accuracy currently needed for E-911 services; this would provide sufficient resolution for wayfinding, automated bus routing services and similar location-dependent services.

Critical service logic: making sense of value creation and co-creation

Abstract: Because extant literature on the service logic of marketing is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation, the roles of both service providers and customers remain analytically unspecified, without a theoretically sound foundation for value creation or co-creation. This article analyzes value creation and co-creation in service by analytically defining the roles of the customer and the firm, as well as the scope, locus, and nature of value and value creation. Value creation refers to customers’ creation of value-in-use; co-creation is a function of interaction. Both the firm’s and the customer’s actions can be categorized by spheres (provider, joint, customer), and their interactions are either direct or indirect, leading to different forms of value creation and co-creation. This conceptualization of value creation spheres extends knowledge about how value-in-use emerges and how value creation can be managed; it also emphasizes the pivotal role of direct interactions for value co-creation opportunities.

A Role Theory Perspective on Dyadic Interactions: The Service Encounter:

Abstract: This article proposes that the dyadic interaction between a service provider and a customer is an important determinant of the customer's global satisfaction with the service. Based on role theory,...

Interactive market management system

Abstract: A system for interactive on-line electronic communications and processing of business transactions between a plurality of different types of independent users including at least a plurality of sellers, and a plurality of buyers, as well as financial institutions, and freight service providers. Each user can communicate with the system from remote terminals adapted to access communication links and the system may include remote terminals adapted for storage of a remote data base. The system includes a data base which contains user information. The data base is accessed via a validation procedure to permit business transactions in an interactive on-line mode between users during interactive business transaction sessions wherein one party to the transaction is specifically selected by the other party. The system permits concurrent interactive business transaction sessions between different users.