Benefits For Service Providers Research Articles

Overcoming Tolling Complexity

T-Systems Road User Services is using innovative business approaches to navigate the European tolling ecosystem, and as one of the founders of Toll4Europe it is helping all service providers benefit from EETS

Predicting Sociodemographic Attributes from Mobile Usage Patterns: Applications and Privacy Implications.

When users interact with their mobile devices, they leave behind unique digital footprints that can be viewed as predictive proxies that reveal an array of users' characteristics, including their demographics. Predicting users' demographics based on mobile usage can provide significant benefits for service providers and users, including improving customer targeting, service personalization, and market research efforts. This study uses machine learning algorithms and mobile usage data from 235 demographically diverse users to examine the accuracy of predicting their sociodemographic attributes (age, gender, income, and education) from mobile usage metadata, filling the gap in the current literature by quantifying the predictive power of each attribute and discussing the practical applications and privacy implications. According to the results, gender can be most accurately predicted (balanced accuracy = 0.862) from mobile usage footprints, whereas predicting users' education level is more challenging (balanced accuracy = 0.719). Moreover, the classification models were able to classify users based on whether their age or income was above or below a certain threshold with acceptable accuracy. The study also presents the practical applications of inferring demographic attributes from mobile usage data and discusses the implications of the findings, such as privacy and discrimination risks, from the perspectives of different stakeholders.

Participating Citizens = Smart Citizens? Applying the Human-centered Design Approach on a Digital Care Platform

New digital innovations are becoming increasingly relevant in the healthcare sector of smart cities. Although the healthcare sector has not been the focus of smart city strategies so far, this sector offers a high potential to save resources. One such measure is the development of a digital care platform. A digital care platform is intended to counteract the shortage of skilled care staff through the targeted deployment of caregivers. To meet the needs of users and service providers, a target group-oriented, human-centered design approach is applied to evaluate the benefits of a care platform for users and service providers. The results are recorded with the help of a Benefit Model. During the surveys, it became clear that users and service providers benefit from the use of a care platform in technical, economic, and social aspects, among others. In the process, stakeholders not only save important resources but also can build valuable networks for healthy and successful aging.

Peran Kepemimpinan Kepala Desa Dalam Pemberian Pelayanan Publik Dan Tantangannya Pada Era Revolusi Industri 4.0 (Desa Gandasuli Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan)

The purpose of this study was to determine the leadership role of the Village Head in providing public services and the challenges in the industrial revolution 4.0 era in Gandasuli Village. Researchers use indicators of motivators, facilitators and mobilizers to determine the leadership role of the Village Head in providing public services, while the challenge is that researchers use indicators of support, capacity and value. This research uses descriptive qualitative method, and the data analysis used is an interactive model starting from reduction, data presentation and verification/conclusion.
 The results of this study indicate that the leadership role of the Village Head in providing public services with the role of motivator, facilitator and mobilizer has not been maximized. Meanwhile, the challenge of providing public services in the era of the industrial revolution 4.0 in Gandasuli Village was sufficientsupportfrom the local government, then in terms of capacity there is not yet qualified human resources, then the value will be that there will be benefits for service providers and service recipients in Gandasuli Village when implementing a digital-based service system.

Influence of Financial Ability, Financial Knowledge, and Security on The Interest in Using Digital Payments as a Development of Sharia Economy

A good understanding of Islamic financial literacy and digital financial services can be used as the basis for governments and Islamic financial institutions to formulate product communication strategies to be precise and accurate. Digital financial services provide many benefits for service providers as well as for users. This quantitative research was conducted by survey method using a questionnaire with purposive sampling technique. The questionnaire was tested for validity and reliability first and exceeded the standard and analysis with descriptive statistics and simple linear regression. This study found that Islamic financial literacy has a positive and significant effect on digital financial services in consumers in Yogyakarta. The influence of Islamic financial literacy is 54.1%, while other variables outside this study are 45.9%.
 Keywords: Islamic Financial Literacy; Digital Financial Services

The Influence of Islamic Financial Literacy on The Use of Digital Financial Services in Yogyakarta

A good understanding of Islamic financial literacy and digital financial services can be used as the basis for governments and Islamic financial institutions to formulate product communication strategies to be precise and accurate. Digital financial services provide many benefits for service providers as well as for users. This quantitative research was conducted by survey method using a questionnaire with purposive sampling technique. The questionnaire was tested for validity and reliability first and exceeded the standard and analysis with descriptive statistics and simple linear regression. This study found that Islamic financial literacy has a positive and significant effect on digital financial services in consumers in Yogyakarta. The influence of Islamic financial literacy is 54.1%, while other variables outside this study are 45.9%.
 Keywords: Islamic Financial Literacy; Digital Financial Services

Effect of social status signaling in an organic restaurant setting有机餐厅背景下社会地位信号的影响

ABSTRACT Despite the popularity of organic consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic, little research has examined how organic service experience predicts brand-related outcomes. To examine how organic restaurant service providers benefit from signaling social status the authors examine identification, evaluation, and revisit intention as the key consequences. Using data from 204 American customers, the results of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) show that social status signaling has a positive effect on identification and evaluation of restaurant brand. Also, mediating role of identification and evaluation in the relationship between social status signaling and revisit intention is found. However, signaling of social status alone is not enough to elicit positive behaviors from customers. Multigroup analysis identifies that customers’ trust has a significant moderating effect on the association of the proposed relations. This empirical evidence contributes to the application of the signaling theory and provides managerial guidelines for organic restaurant service providers.

Remote monitoring of rural water systems: A pathway to improved performance and sustainability?

AbstractThe presence of the mobile phone network in rural areas where there is little other infrastructure has opened up the prospect of automatically monitoring rural water systems, something previously possible only in person and perhaps only on foot. The technology to monitor these systems continues to develop: basic systems are now leaving research and being implemented in operational WASH programs; machine learning is making pump failure prediction possible. With the move from the previous infrastructure‐focused community management paradigm, to a service‐delivery approach to rural water, remote monitoring has salience with its potential to inform professional maintenance services. This is not without cost. To justify its use in rural water service delivery remote monitoring must generate benefits for service providers: (1) it must be integrated into management systems, and help redesign them; (2) it must contribute to increases in performance that produce real improvement in outcomes for water users; (3) it must open up new transparent sources of funding previously unavailable to the rural water sector. If remote monitoring can do these three things it has a role to play in achieving SDG 6.1; if not it will join the list of development techno‐fixes that failed to make an impact despite the best of intentions.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Human Water

Algorithmic Content Moderation on Social Media in EU Law: Illusion of Perfect Enforcement

Intermediaries today do much more than passively distribute user content and facilitate user interactions. They now have near-total control of users’ online experience and content moderation. Even though these service providers benefit from the same liability exemption regime as technical intermediaries (E-Commerce Directive, Art. 14), they have unique characteristics that must be addressed. Consequently, many debates are ongoing to decide whether or not platforms should be more strictly regulated. Platforms are required to remove illegal content in the event of notice and take-down procedures built on automated processing and are equally encouraged to take proactive and automated measures to detect and remove it. Algorithmic decision-making helps to scale down the massive task of content moderation. It would, therefore, seem that algorithmic decision-making would be the most effective way to provide perfect enforcement. However, this is an illusion. A first difficulty occurs when deciding what, precisely, is illegal. Platforms manage the removal of illegal content automatically, which makes it particularly challenging to verify that the law is being respected. The automated decision-making systems are opaque and many scholars have shown that the main problem here is the over-removal chilling effect. Moreover, content removal is a task which, in many circumstances, should not be automated, as it depends on an appreciation of both the context and the rule of law. To address this multi-faceted issue, I offer solutions to improve algorithmic accountability and to increase the transparency around automated decision-making. Improvements may be made specifically by providing platform users with new rights, which in turn will provide stronger guarantees for judicial and non-judicial redress in the event of over-removal.

Effectiveness of prenatal intensive counselling on knowledge, attitude and acceptance of post placental intrauterine contraceptive device among mothers

<strong>Introduction:</strong> Contraception is a method or device used to prevent pregnancy. In the first year of postpartum period around 65% of women are having unmet need of family planning. Post Placental Intrauterine Contraceptive Device is not only advantageous to the women and couples; even the service providers benefit from PPIUCD. PPIUCD insertion on the same delivery table saves time and separate clinical procedure is not required.

Maximizing Revenue Resource Allocation Algorithm for Power Communication Network Service Providers

In order to improve the revenue of power communication network service providers, this paper first constructs a power communication network resource allocation model composed of self-built service providers, third-party service providers and demanders, and models resource allocation problems in power communication networks. Secondly, the Jacobi iteration formula of service capability is derived, and the optimal resource allocation algorithm of service provider is proposed. In the simulation experiment, it is verified that in the competing environment including the self-built service provider and the third-party service provider, the resource allocation of the power communication network has achieved Nash equilibrium in terms of service capability, and when the third-party service provider is introduced, the capital investment of network resources is reduced and the benefits of service providers is increased.

Analyzing Software Rejuvenation Techniques in a Virtualized System: Service Provider and User Views

Virtualization technology has promoted the fast development and deployment of cloud computing, and is now becoming an enabler of Internet of Everything. Virtual machine monitor (VMM), playing a critical role in a virtualized system, is software and hence it suffers from software aging after a long continuous running as well as software crashes due to elusive faults. Software rejuvenation techniques can be adopted to reduce the impact of software aging. Although there existed analytical model-based approaches for evaluating software rejuvenation techniques, none analyzed both application service (AS) availability and job completion time in a virtualized system with live virtual machine (VM) migration. This paper aims to quantitatively analyze software rejuvenation techniques from service provider and user views in a virtualized system deploying VMM reboot and live VM migration techniques for rejuvenation, under the condition that all the aging time, failure time, VMM fixing time and live VM migration time follow general distributions. We construct an analytical model by using a semi-Markov process (SMP) and derive formulas for calculating AS availability and job completion time. By analytical experiments, we can obtain the optimal migration trigger intervals for achieving the approximate maximum AS availability and the approximate minimum job completion time, and then service providers can make decisions for maximizing the benefits of service providers and users by adjusting parameter values.

Effectiveness of demographic characteristics in understanding Malaysian customers’ perceived value of the integrated resort sector

Incorporating demographic variables in brand management provides many practical benefits for service providers. Although the impact of customers’ perceived values on their attitude and behavior has been extensively examined in the past, studies connecting customers’ demographic characteristics and their tourism behavior remain scarce. Thus, this study aims to empirically investigate the role of demographic variables (e.g. gender, age, income, and marital status) in the relationship between perceived value and brand-related behavior. Specifically, the research conducts several multigroup analyses to examine how demographic factors link Malaysian customers’ behavior toward integrated resort brands. Demographic factors are found to associate with customers’ perceived spiritual, status, efficiency, and aesthetic values. Findings reveal that customers’ individual characteristics and perceived values produce different results in their future behavioral intention toward integrated resort brands. In addition, the impact of spiritual and aesthetic values on brand loyalty is stronger among male customers than among female customers. Moreover, personal satisfaction is highly influential among low-income and married customers. On the basis of these findings, this study provides implications not only for integrated resort service providers but also for destination marketers to develop micromarketing strategies.

Federation of Attribute Providers for User Self-Sovereign Identity

In a world where people must subject themselves to high scrutiny in every process they initiate, and in a world where the digital environment grows incessantly, we anticipate more online services asking for personal attributes and their need to trust in such attributes. For tackling such need, we describe a proposal for a secure, decentralized and shared repository of certified personal attributes. Individuals benefit because they have full control over the disclosure of their set of certified attributes (e.g. to assert their identities to service providers). The certifying entities benefit from a blockchain-based, resilient and decentralized infrastructure, avoiding the higher costs of an always-on, centralized infrastructure, while retaining the power to issue and revoke certified attributes. Finally service providers benefit from the correctness and freshness of the certified attributes that individuals disclosed to them.

Factors associated with induced demand for services in Iran’s healthcare system

Background: One of the most important subjects in health economics and healthcare management is the theory of induced demand; that is, caring for or providing and selling unnecessary services to users of healthcare systems, which is accompanied by the exercising of power by the service providers. Methods: This study was performed on physicians, nurses, and laboratory and radiology technicians working in Medical Science universities. Random sampling was conducted from five areas: the center, north, west, east and south of Iran. Data were gathered by a questionnaire, with a Cronbach's alpha of &gt;0.7, consisting of nine dimensions on existence of induced demand and its associated factors. Results: The results showed that overall, 65.2% of the participants agreed with the existence of induced demand. Chi-squared test showed there was no difference in the level of induced demand between the regions of the country, education level and occupation. However, there was a significant difference in terms of gender (P&lt;0.005). The Kruskal-Wallis test indicated a significant relationship between the associated factors and induced demand (P&lt;0.005). Conclusions: Results showed that induced demand was influenced by factors including service recipients’ awareness, personal benefits of service providers, the extent they cared about health, supervision of insurance companies, industrialization of the health sector, diversity and increased number of trained experts and the quality of methods of training the service providers. Therefore, policymakers and planners should consider raising awareness of health service recipients, supervising insurance companies, reforming teaching methods, social culture making and changing the beliefs of society.

On the Values of Vehicle-to-Grid Electricity Selling in Electric Vehicle Sharing

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in the mass adoption of vehicle sharing systems across the world. Among various vehicle sharing systems, electric vehicle (EV) sharing is considered as the most effective means in reducing fossil fuel consumption and alleviating urban transportation problems. In this paper, we study how to further enhance the effectiveness of EV sharing as a promising sustainable transportation solution for the future by integrating vehicle-to-grid (V2G) electricity selling in EV sharing systems. In specific, we study service-zone and facility capacity planning and fleet management in EV sharing systems with V2G integration. We formulate the problem as a two-stage stochastic integer program. In the first stage, we optimize integer decision variables representing the planning of service zones, the capacity of parking and charging facilities, and the allocation of EVs in each zone under uncertain time-dependent travel demand and electricity prices. In the second stage, for each demand-price realization, we construct a time-and-vehicle-charging-status-expanded transportation network and optimize the operations of shared vehicle fleet, the charging of EV batteries, and the V2G selling process. We develop Benders decomposition and scenario decomposition algorithms for efficiently solving the proposed models with finite samples. By solving diverse instances generated from real-world and synthetic data, we demonstrate the computational efficacy of our approaches and study the benefits of integrating V2G in EV sharing from three aspects, including i) service provider benefit through higher profitability, ii) consumer benefit through improved service satisfaction, and iii) socio-environmental benefit through the reduction of private vehicle ownership and mileage and providing flexible capacity to the power grid.

A bounded-risk mechanism for the kidney exchange game

In this paper, we introduce and study the notion of low risk mechanisms. Intuitively, we say a mechanism is a low risk mechanism if the randomization of the mechanism does not affect the utility of agents by a lot. Specifically, we desire to design mechanisms in which the variances of the utility of agents are small. Inspired by this work, later, Procaccia et al. (0000) study the approximation–variance tradeoffs in mechanism design.In particular, here we present a low risk mechanism for the pairwise kidney exchange game. This game naturally appears in situations that some service providers benefit from pairwise allocations on a network, such as the kidney exchanges between hospitals. Ashlagi et al. (2013) present a 2-approximation randomized truthful mechanism for this problem. This is the best-known result in this setting with multiple players. However, we note that the variance of the utility of an agent in this mechanism may be as large as Ω(n2), where n is the number of vertices. Indeed, this is not desirable in a real application. In this paper, we resolve this issue by providing a 2-approximation randomized truthful mechanism in which the variance of the utility of each agent is at most 2+ϵ.As a side result, we apply our technique to design a deterministic mechanism such that, if an agent deviates from the mechanism, she does not gain more than 2⌈log2m⌉, where m is the number of players.

Coordinated service provision in payment for ecosystem service schemes through adaptive governance

In this paper, we look to the adaptive governance literature for insight into how payment schemes for the provision of ecosystem services might be designed to achieve multiple socially desirable objectives over different spatial scales instead of simply focusing on localised benefits for service providers. Using the principles of adaptive governance, we explore how the concepts of lateral information flows and incentive alignment might shape ecosystem service payment schemes and allow the coordination of ecosystem service priorities across different jurisdictions. We suggest that progressing from purely anthropocentric assessments of payment schemes towards biocentric evaluations may lead to improved design principles. We discuss specific advantages of adaptive governance approaches over traditional centralised governance models related to policy-experimentation at multiple spatial scales, institutional variety and deliberative decision-making processes that establish dialogue between service providers and beneficiaries that promote group learning.

A coalitional game approach on improving interactions in multiple overlay environments

The overlay network has been widely deployed by Service Providers (SPs) to provide services. Since there are multiple SPs built upon the same Internet Service Provider (ISP), their overlays are co-existing and may interfere with each other. The selfishness of overlay may lead to sub-optimal performance and traffic arrangement dilemma for overlays. To optimize the performance of overlays and maximize the benefit of SPs, we propose a cooperative overlay optimization approach, in which overlays can form coalitions freely for the purpose of cooperation. This approach performs a two-step process: the coalition optimization process and the coalition formation process. Several models are applied to describe these two processes. The overlay routing problem of a coalition, the revenue allocation problem, and the convergence problem of coalition formation are analyzed and solved. In the coalition formation process, the relationship between co-existing overlays is also analyzed. Simulations are performed to evaluate our approach, which is proved to be effective on improving the performance and balancing the fairness of co-existing overlays.

Stroke manager service for improved post-acute continuity of care

Stroke is one of the leading causes of adult disability being responsible for enormous societal healthcare costs. The inter-institutional post-acute stroke processes suffer from information discontinuity and information asymmetries between stakeholders in the healthcare service network (HSN). A central coordination of the HSN's information flow is a promising approach. Because of disease-specific characteristics or differing legal regulations existing concepts cannot easily be adapted. Therefore, we investigated the current post-acute stroke workflow, the involved technologies and legal regulations. Using a combined service engineering and software engineering approach, we developed a novel stroke manager service that supports the patient along the post-acute care pathway. We identified requirements for such a stroke manager service, its supporting IT-infrastructure and legal issues. This paper presents the requirements for an effective post-stroke management, the complex inter-institutional workflow of the novel stroke manager service and the corresponding stroke manager IT-infrastructure. Domain experts evaluated the requirements confirming the demand for more coordination along the patient's complete medical pathway. The feasibility of the stroke manager service concept has been shown in workshops. Even though the incorporation of existing hospital information systems continues to be challenging, first results show that patients, care-givers and healthcare service providers benefit from the stroke manager service.