Toward a Profitable ISP Business in a Competitive Environment

The market of Internet service providers (ISPs) is highly competitive. Although many different pricing schemes could be deployed in this market, two types are mainly offered: flat rate pricing and per-minute pricing. These pricing schemes are criticised for limiting ISPs’ revenues and for not addressing customer’s requirements on service quality. We focus on the ISPs’ business relationships and on their pricing strategies in order to analyse revenue sharing mechanisms. We argue that the introduction of incentive pricing schemes, such as dynamic pricing, may enable provision of service quality by improving revenue sharing among ISPs.

Trust in the Digital Era

In the digital era, trust is a key concern. This chapter introduces a digital era interaction (DEI) matrix to explore trust relationships at multiple levels: between individuals, individuals and organizations, and between organizations. It considers each of these interaction aspects in turn; it draws on recent research projects as examples, and develops a common set of themes. The chapter concludes by identifying areas for further research that will help to advance our understanding of the role of trust in inter-organizational and interpersonal virtual interactions. It argues that such research is necessary if organizations and individuals are to benefit fully from the potential and the promise of virtually enabled interactions.

Policy-Driven Signing Frameworks in Open Electronic Transactions

Electronically signed transactions typically associate the applied electronic signature with the signed data and implicitly with the terms and conditions related to the scope of the performed transaction. Some aspects of the association between an electronic signature and the transaction can be conveyed by means of a signature policy. Signature policies are a set of rules for the creation and validation of an electronic signature, under which an electronic signature can be determined to be valid. This chapter suggest however, that additional transaction constraints might be conveyed by means of a signature policy. Standardization work has highlighted signature policies as a significant element to leverage trust in electronic commerce transactions that make use of electronic signatures. Summing up technological, organizational and legal concerns, this chapter addresses issues related to the content, form and function of signature policies within a transaction context.

Digital Divide Challenge

Following an initial euphoria about the power of the information superhighway to provide better access to information and wealth for all, what we have experienced in reality instead is that information and communication technologies have created further inequalities at individual, business, national and international level. To ease the effects of this “digital divide,” policy makers have taken up the role of change agencies, influencing the public in using innovative information technologies. This chapter focuses on the role of these change agencies for technology diffusion and the elimination of the digital divide. It is argued that examining the interest of change agencies and the other stakeholders involved in the diffusion process from a normative perspective can help in the preparation of effective information technology diffusion policies.

What is the Digital Era?

While there are many useful ways of describing and discussing the Digital Era, explanations of its existence are lacking. The Digital Era is characterized by technology which increases the speed and breadth of knowledge turnover within the economy and society. Evolutionary theory, as an explanation of the system we live in, states that sustainability relies on knowledge turnover. In parts of the system which are relatively stable, knowledge turnover is low, and new variation, when produced, is rarely retained. In other, less stable parts of the system, faster knowledge turnover is advantageous as new knowledge is produced more frequently allowing for adaptation to the changing surrounding environment. Mixing and matching rates of knowledge turnover makes for a dynamic but ever-lasting world. The Digital Era can be seen as the development of an evolutionary system in which knowledge turnover is not only very high, but also increasingly out of the control of humans, making it a time in which our lives become more difficult to manage. For example, in the second generation Internet, ‘the semantic web’, functionality, which understands meaning, replaces the search function of unknowingly matching words, which often have multiple meanings. In time, within this version of the Internet, software agents will exchange knowledge without human intervention. Equally, our understanding of the knowledge embedded within the human genome about how we relate to the world, generated in association with technology and freely available on the Internet, raises questions about our assumptions of control. Do we know enough about our future to change our genome? Can we control such changes and their diffusion? The social and economic implications of the Digital Era are huge and will increase as technological functionality becomes more knowledge-based, our everyday lives and understanding of ourselves become more linked to it, and it takes on a ‘life’ of its own. Understanding the Digital Era in terms of evolution will help ensure we build sustainable socio-economic relationships both with technology and with the advanced knowledge that technology helps us create.

Labor Flexibility and the Information Society

This study investigates flexible work organization in the Information Society. Based on data from Greek companies, the study attempts to identify the relationship between the level of training and the use of independent contractors, temporaries and subcontractors with regard to the level of ICT adoption. Findings generally appear to suggest that firms recognize the need for personnel training to exploit the advantages of ICT use, however, different types of working arrangements are subject to an increase of training level, whereas temporaries appear not to benefit from any work-related training.

Network Topography of the New Economy

This chapter develops a framework of analysis of the emerging organizational network topology of the new knowledge-driven economy in order to identify critical factors that underpin sustainable processes of innovation. The central argument of the chapter is that in the new economy innovation constitutes the foundation of the competitiveness and value-creating capabilities of economic organizations. Innovation has emerged as a strategic issue because of the disarticulation of established economic and social structures and processes that the new economy and the new society bring in their path. This disarticulation is the product of the interplay of technological, industrial, economic and social transformations. In this context, innovation is not something happening “inside” organizations but rather at the interface of organizations with the business, regulatory and institutional environment within which they operate. The process of innovation is increasingly driven by open-source networks of cooperation and involves dynamic interrelationships between technological transformations, organizational capabilities of firms, and public institutional and regulatory structures supportive of innovation and entrepreneurship. In other words, for new information and communication technologies that power the new economy to be able to spread throughout the whole economy, thus enhancing productivity growth, business firms, the institutions and culture of society, and the factors implicated in the production process need to undergo substantial change.

Building Trust Online

Several properties of online interaction are challenging the accumulated wisdom of trading communities on how to produce and manage trust. Online reputation systems have emerged as a promising trust management mechanism in such settings. The objective of this chapter is to contribute to the construction of online reputation systems that are robust in the presence of unfair and deceitful raters. The chapter sets the stage in identifying a number of important ways in which the reliability of the current generation of reputation systems can be compromised by unfair buyers and sellers. The central contribution of the chapter is a number of novel “immunization mechanisms” for countering the undesirable effects of such fraudulent behavior. The chapter describes the mechanisms, proves their properties and explains how various parameters of the marketplace, most notably the anonymity and authentication regimes, can influence their effectiveness. Finally, it concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for managers and users of current and future electronic marketplaces and identifies some important open issues for future research.

Leveraging Knowledge Assets in Firms of the Digital Era

The management of organisational knowledge can be a key lever for improving performance, boosting productivity and creativity, and facilitating innovation in corporate settings. The commonly used approaches for managing knowledge followed one of two perspectives: the process-centric (a primarily people-based approach that treats knowledge management as a social communication process) and a product-centric approach (that is mostly content-based and focuses on knowledge-related artifacts). This chapter presents a strategic management approach and an integrated solution that are knowledge asset-based and attempt to fuse the aforementioned two approaches in a balanced manner. The overall approach builds upon and extends the resource-based view of the firm by explicitly treating knowledge assets as the main driver for innovation and learning. The approach is demonstrated with a case study that focuses on the knowledge networks of a software firm.

Learning-Supported Decision-Making

The biggest challenge for any organization is managing the disperse nature of knowledge across a diverse set of knowledge carriers. The role of ICTs in supporting and extending the organizational memory is of particular concern. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the challenges the Digital era presents us by proposing a socio-technical framework, which emphasizes feedback as the critical link connecting social systems and technical structures The main thrust of the framework is the alignment of social structures and social actors in ways that seek to integrate different modes of learning with different models of decision-making. This integration is to be supported by a range of decision-learning structures (in ICT systems), which create different feedback levels. These feedback levels are the main focus of the chapter which makes a valuable contribution in extending debates of learning, decision-making and their relationship demonstrating the inherent challenges of the digital era in using ICTs as social as much as technical tools.