Service Profit Research Articles

Spotify: profitability in music streaming services

Spotify: profitability in music streaming services

Protecting Intellectual Property of Language Generation APIs with Lexical Watermark

Nowadays, due to the breakthrough in natural language generation (NLG), including machine translation, document summarization, image captioning, etc NLG models have been encapsulated in cloud APIs to serve over half a billion people worldwide and process over one hundred billion word generations per day. Thus, NLG APIs have already become essential profitable services in many commercial companies. Due to the substantial financial and intellectual investments, service providers adopt a pay-as-you-use policy to promote sustainable market growth. However, recent works have shown that cloud platforms suffer from financial losses imposed by model extraction attacks, which aim to imitate the functionality and utility of the victim services, thus violating the intellectual property (IP) of cloud APIs. This work targets at protecting IP of NLG APIs by identifying the attackers who have utilized watermarked responses from the victim NLG APIs. However, most existing watermarking techniques are not directly amenable for IP protection of NLG APIs. To bridge this gap, we first present a novel watermarking method for text generation APIs by conducting lexical modification to the original outputs. Compared with the competitive baselines, our watermark approach achieves better identifiable performance in terms of p-value, with fewer semantic losses. In addition, our watermarks are more understandable and intuitive to humans than the baselines. Finally, the empirical studies show our approach is also applicable to queries from different domains, and is effective on the attacker trained on a mixture of the corpus which includes less than 10% watermarked samples.

A New Framework to Enhance Carpooling Service Profitability

A New Framework to Enhance Carpooling Service Profitability

Product line and service pricing considering negative network effects

The network effects of products and services have an important impact on the design optimization of product lines and services. Value-added services that consider the network effect can significantly affect customers' consumption decisions. Meanwhile, they can infiltrate the main products and promote the profits of enterprises. As an effective sales strategy, bundling has become a new approach for enterprises to provide products and services. We investigate the optimal pricing and market share, as well as the maximum profits of products and services under pure and mixed bundling strategies, respectively, in the case of negative network effects for both products and services. Based on the multinomial logit model, we theoretically analyze the optimal solution and profit difference under pure and mixed bundling strategies. The results show that, considering the negative network effect, the profit functions of the pure and mixed bundling strategies are concave functions vis-à-vis the market share, and closed solutions of optimal pricing and market share, as well as maximum profits are obtained. Finally, the numerical simulation shows the profit difference between pure and mixed bundling strategies when the network effect changes. The research results can provide a theoretical basis and decision-making support for products and services pricing strategies.

COVID-19 Pandemic in India: First Wave v/s Second Wave

Coronavirus is related to a group of RNA viruses, which is a deadly disease having a disastrous impactworldwide. On March 11, 2020, the unconventional coronavirus sickness (covid-19) became defined as avirulent disease by means of international fitness corporation WHO. This disorder is highly epizootic whencompared to influenza and such cluster outbreaks often arise. Lamentably, COVID-19 sufferers show signsand symptoms like common cold. Evaluating all the events during COVID to different respiratory illnesses,which includes influenza, SARS, and MERS, to check whether they are present otherwise, it is anticipatedthat, influenza starts off with cough, while corona virus-related disorder begins with fever. Although COVID- 19 varies from SARS as well as MERS in terms of gastrointestinal symptoms. COVID is the fastest growinghuman race fitness worldwide, not only socially but also economically. Among the major concerns of thecoronavirus epidemic were a significant decline in profit and transportation services, an increase in unemployment, and the closure of business sectors. In addition, central governments in the international arena have reduced the risk of the spread of COVID-19 and are generally responding to disasters in theircountries. Since the spread of this pandemic is unlikely to decrease in the near future, due to mutations in genome of virus. Hence preventive measures are essential to save lives and economic well-being from further spread to humans. Current work, which is based solely on available information and the available literature, discusses various factors that contribute to the consequences of COVID-19 in humans at specific age, social and economic levels during first wave and second wave.

OPTIMIZATION OF A SUSTAINABLE MULTI-OBJECTIVE, MULTI-PRODUCT, AND MULTI-ITEM SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORK USING Ɛ-LEXICOGRAPHIC PROCEDURE

In this paper, a mathematical model of multi-objective, multi-item, multi-product, and multi-period mathematical model has been developed in which several objectives; profit, total cost, and overall customer service level (OCSL) have been optimized using the Ɛ-lexicographic procedure. The potential network of supply chain may include two suppliers, one factory, and two retailers. The model considered the network design in addition to the production, inventory, and transportation planning in multi-periods. The proposed model is formulated using mixed-integer linear programming and solved by XpressIVE. The behavior of the model has been verified by solving two scenarios of different demand patterns. The results verify the ability of the developed model to assist the SC organizations to manage their networks more efficiently.

The Effect of Compensation, Job Satisfaction and Career Development on Performance of Manpower and Transmigration Services in West Kutai District


 
 
 The organization is a complex entity that seeks to allocate human resources to achieve goals fully. The role of human resources in organizations that adhere to a profit and non-profit service system is crucial because, without human help, any form of technological equipment and any sophisticated equipment owned by the organization will not be able to function optimally. This study aims to determine the effect of compensation on the performance of the employees of the Manpower and Transmigration Office of West Kutai Regency, the impact of job satisfaction on the performance of the employees of the Manpower and Transmigration Office of West Kutai Regency, the influence of career development on the performance of the Manpower and Transmigration Office of West Kutai Regency, the effect of the most dominant impact on the performance of the Manpower and Transmigration Office of West Kutai Regency and the effect of compensation, job satisfaction, and career development together on the performance of the employees of the West Kutai Regency Manpower and Transmigration Office. This study uses quantitative. Sources of data used in this study are primary data and secondary data. This research procedure involves interviews, questionnaires, and a literature study. The results of testing the t-test hypothesis significantly affect compensation on the performance of the Manpower and Transmigration Office of West Kutai Regency employees. Balance has a positive effect, which means employee performance will increase if payment is carried out on time.
 
 

A Multiserver Configuration and Request Distribution Framework for Profit Maximization in a Three-Tier Cloud Service Architecture

The rapid development of cloud computing has generated numerous cloud service providers. In a three-tier cloud service architecture, maximizing the cloud service profit is not only a goal pursued by cloud service providers but also a potent force that drives the continuous development of cloud computing technology. The traditional methods of maximizing cloud service profits are either limited to cloud resource management or service request distribution. Few work contributes to maximizing the profit of cloud service providers while considering both resource management and request distribution. Besides, the heterogeneity of servers is also an important concern when configuring the multiserver system. Therefore, this paper proposes a multiserver configuration and request distribution framework oriented to a three-tier cloud service architecture for maximizing the profit of cloud service providers. Compared with the benchmark method, extensive numerical simulation experiments show that our proposed framework can not only maximize the profit of cloud service providers, but also has a well-time efficiency.

MANAGEMENT OF PRODUCTION POTENTIAL CONSIDERING FACTORS OF FIXED ASSETS RENEWAL ON THE BASIS OF MODELING

The article considers the approaches to the analysis and management of dynamics of the production potential, in particular fixed assets (FA) dynamics, on the basis of modeling this process. The need for such research arises due to the fact that in economic theory, in general, there are not enough works that would analytically link the rates of production growth, as a result, with the factors that determine it: service life and profitability of FA, depreciation rate, share of capitalized profit. According to the adopted approach, the study is performed in two stages. First of all, the scheme of FA renewal, taking into account constant of their growth rates and the service life is being constructed. In the second stage, an appropriate economic-mathematical dependence is developed and solved. In general, the article uses indicators that are generally accepted in the economic analysis of enterprises. However, both in theory and in practice, this is not related to the results achieved in relation to such a criterion as the growth rate of production. The study allowed to obtain the appropriate analytical apparatus to solve this problem. The use of a developed equation allowed to build an important quantitative dependence between resource parameters and the growth rate of fixed assets. The results are also presented in tabular form and allow to compare the options for the production potential renewal and take them into account when making appropriate managerial decisions. For the first time, a number of economic conclusions are obtained in the article with the help of modeling, which are important and cannot be detected by other methods of analysis. Also, for the first time by approximating the nonlinear rather complex dependence a simple dependence is obtained to calculate FA' renewal and disposal coefficients. That consequently allows determining the components of investment structure, which are used for FA' renewal.

Systematic Analysis and Modelling of Profit Maximization on Carsharing

The success of carsharing as a relatively new and more sustainable way of traveling is moving private car ownership towards a service use model. Competitivity is an essential aspect of this service and ways to increase profit while offering the most appealing service are still getting explored. Among others, dynamic pricing strategies can be designed to increase profit by attracting more users, selling more rental hours, or maximizing fleet utilization. In this paper, we propose an experimental method aimed at developing a model for maximizing service profit. Using agent-based modeling to generate realistic scenarios, we analyze pricing as a function of the potential demand (i.e., number of members) and supply (hours of booking supplied). The process of reaching the maximum profit consists of testing various combinations of pricing-demand and pricing-supply ranges in order to find the values that maximize the profit for every demand and supply level. Once the optimal prices are known, a polynomial fitting and an optimization method are used to generate a functional form linking all the maximal profit obtaining the advised price to offer for any specific supply levels. Results show how the profit only slightly depends on the variability of the potential demand, while it strongly depends on the amount of supply. It is then shown how it is possible to obtain a linear relation that maximizes the profit in the function of the price offered once the supply is given.

Multiserver configuration for cloud service profit maximization in the presence of soft errors based on grouped grey wolf optimizer

With the growing demand of cloud customers for computing resources, cloud computing has become more and more popular. As a pay-as-you-go model, cloud computing enables customers to use cloud services on demand anytime, anywhere over the Internet and it has become the backbone of modern economy. Obviously, profit maximization is especially important for cloud service providers (CSPs) in a competitive cloud service market. Extensive research papers have been conducted during the past few years for CSPs to optimize cloud service profit, whereas few of them considers the transient faults (resulting in soft errors) that may happen during service requests’ execution and thus cause failed execution of these requests. In this paper, we study the multiserver configuration problem for cloud service profit maximization considering the deadline miss rate of service requests and the soft error reliability of the multiserver system. To solve the profit optimization problem, we first construct the models of multiserver system, deadline miss rate, and soft error reliability. Based on these models, we derive the models associated with cloud service revenue and cloud service costs. Then, we formulate the cloud service profit optimization problem and propose an effective grouped grey wolf optimizer (GWO)-based heuristic method that can determine the optimal multiserver configuration for a given customer demand to maximize cloud service profit. Experimental results show that the cloud service profit improvement achieved by our scheme can be up to 33.76% as compared with a state-of-the-art benchmark scheme.

Addressing service profit chain with artificial and emotional intelligence

ABSTRACT In view of the prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) – powered applications in service organizations, this paper draws on service profit chain theory and proposes these applications as a service product for employees (referred to as internal customers) and customers. The outcome of which is to examine the influence of AI service quality on internal and external customer loyalty. Customer satisfaction and engagement are modeled as mediators, whereas emotional intelligence (EI) is a moderator in AI – customer loyalty relationships. Two studies were undertaken with employees and customers in Australian-based hotels to examine these relationships. The results show that AI service quality is significantly related to internal and external customer satisfaction and engagement. Both internal and external customer engagement have significant effects on customer loyalty and play a significant mediation role in the service quality – customer loyalty relationship. EI has only a significant moderation effect on the relationship between AI service quality and customer engagement for internal and external customers. Discussion and implications of the research findings are provided for researchers and practitioners.

Revenue Management of Group Service Considering Different Quality Levels and Stochastic Customer Patience

We consider a service that provides different quality levels to customers who are served in groups (referred to as “group service” (GS)). We consider stochastic customer patience and build a multitype service model to maximize service profit. First, we consider a fixed number of service personnel and decompose the model into several subproblems. We then transform the model into a service personnel allocation problem that can be efficiently solved. Furthermore, we use the water-filling theory, together with a dichotomy approach, to design the numerical algorithm to conduct a numerical test based on actual data. The main contributions of this study are as follows. First, we provide the service provider with a service capacity allocation mechanism that can determine the optimal choice of service quality levels, number of service groups of different quality levels, time length of the service registration period, and service prices. Second, we find that under scarce service capacity, the single-type service can be more profitable than the multitype service, and low-quality services have higher marginal profits than high-quality services. However, when service capacity increases to a certain level, the multitype service can be more profitable than the single-type service. Third, we construct a service capacity decision mechanism and demonstrate the influence of service quality on the total number of service personnel and service groups. The conclusions are potentially useful to GS service providers to effectively make better managerial decisions and improve service profits.

Opportunities for coastal wetland restoration for blue carbon with co-benefits for biodiversity, coastal fisheries, and water quality

Coastal wetlands are known to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide, while also providing valuable ecosystem services. We assessed the economic feasibility of restoring coastal wetlands for climate change mitigation by reinstating tidal flows on floodplain, agricultural land of the Wet Tropics catchments in Queensland, Australia. We assessed whether potential carbon credits would be sufficient to incentivise conversion of the land, or whether additional ecosystem service payments would be required. We explored the co-benefits for biodiversity, fisheries, and nitrogen removal using a prioritisation approach to identify profitable restoration solutions that maximise these benefits. We identified 5,046 ha of potential restorable area that could abate 221,006 tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2-e) annually from carbon sequestration in vegetation and soils and avoided greenhouse gas emissions. Cost-benefit analysis over 25 years demonstrate that 3,399 ha (67%) would be profitable under conventional farm management practice using the current Australian carbon price ($13.85 per tonne CO2-e), which increased to 4,534 ha (90%) at a higher carbon price ($25 per tonne CO2-e). The profitability of coastal wetland restoration was enhanced by a higher carbon price, which can be achieved by bundling ecosystem services, or through stacking ecosystem service payments. Prioritising restoration sites by cost-effectiveness and co-benefits can achieve multiple ecosystem services for a substantial profit.

Hospital Service Offerings StillDiffer Substantially By Ownership Type.

Nonprofit, for-profit, and government hospitals are all more likely to offer services when they are relatively profitable than when they are relatively unprofitable. However, for-profit hospitals are considerably more likely than others to provide services based on profitability. After hospital and market characteristics are adjusted for, nonprofit hospitals offer relatively unprofitable services more than for-profit hospitals and less than government hospitals. Profitable services typically exhibit the opposite pattern. For-profit hospitals are also more likely to adopt or discontinue services consistent with changes in service profitability than are nonprofits, which in turn are more likely to do so than government hospitals. These results are similar to those we found before passage of the Affordable Care Act, when many more patients were uninsured. Policy makers and researchers tend to focus on whether nonprofit hospitals provide sufficient free care to justify tax benefits, thereby overlooking the significance of ownership for service provision, which likely has critical health and spending consequences.

Increasing Profits in Service Production Through Performance Feedback That Reduces Cognitive Time Distortion

This paper contributes to resolving the infamous problem of service production inefficiencies, focusing specifically on service profitability. Two independent experimental laboratory studies show that the profitability of services can be increased using performance feedback that informs task-performing individuals about the accuracy of their temporal assessments of the service tasks they have performed. Reducing inaccuracy in these assessments simultaneously reduces costs and increases service production revenues, boosting service profitability. This effect of feedback on the accuracy of time assessment at work and service profitability is a novel contribution to the literature on the economics of service production.

Development of a System Dynamics Simulation for Assessing Manufacturing Systems Based on the Digital Twin Concept

Historically, manufacturing system researchers and managers have often failed to consider all the areas, factors, and implications of a process within an integrated manufacturing model. Thus, the aim of this research was to develop an integral modeling approach for manufacturing processes in order to assess their status and performance. For this purpose, a novel conceptual model consisting of an integral definition of areas and flows is applied. As a result, manufacturing systems can be modeled, considering all related flows and decision-making options in the respective areas of production, maintenance, and quality. As a result, these models serve as the basis for the integral management and control of manufacturing systems in digital twin models for the regulation of process stability and quality with maintenance strategies. Thus, a system dynamics simulation model is developed for a metallurgical process. The goal of the simulation model is to provide a digital manufacturing system regulated with different maintenance, quality, and production strategies in order to secure quality and delivery service. The results show how the monitoring of all flows together with the optimal strategies in the quality and maintenance areas as a result of a regulated system can enable companies to increase their profitability and customer service level. In conclusion, the applied simulation case study allows better decision making, ensuring continuous optimization along the manufacturing asset lifecycle and providing a unique selling proposition for equipment producers and service engineering suppliers, as well as for production and assembly companies.

Customer experience in digital banking: a review and future research directions

PurposeThis study aims to demonstrate digital banking’s influence on customers’ evaluation of service experience and develop a framework identifying the most significant variables of digital banking that influence the financial performance of banks.Design/methodology/approachThis structured review of literature, guided with the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses framework, takes a digital banking perspective to identify 88 articles published between 2001 and 2021, examining distinct aspects of digital banking and their impact on financial performance.FindingsCustomer experience (CE) is determined by functional clues (functional quality, trust and convenience), mechanic clues (website attributes, website design, perceived usability) and humanic clues (customer complaint handling). The study is furthered to combine CE with the service profit chain model. This study also fills the gap to understand the use of “gamification” in technology-driven banking services to enhance CE. Finally, an integrative framework is proposed to link technology-related factors (digital banking clues and gamification), customer-related factors (CE, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty) and performance-related factors (financial performance).Practical implicationsThe study conceptualises a “total” CE framework that banks can use to enhance their online presence. Banking service providers could also analyse their financial results based on digital banking’s impact on customers. Besides, banks can use this framework to strategically place “game-like features” in their digital platforms.Originality/valueThis study attempts to significantly contribute to the digital marketing literature related to CE with banks. It is one of the first studies to determine gamification explicitly in banking literature.

Empirical study of employee loyalty and satisfaction in the mining industry using structural equation modeling

Mining is a high-risk industry and a crucial economic driver that has a crucial role in the economies of countries worldwide. The implications of the labor market on the sustainability of the mining industry have increased the importance of sustainable human resource management at the strategic level of mining and safety management. In this article, from the perspective of management research in an energy production enterprise, we investigated the relationship between employee loyalty and employee satisfaction through a survey that targets employee loyalty, work quality, and job satisfaction and the relationship between enterprise image and switching costs. Based on service profit chain theory, we established a research model for mining employee loyalty, and 500 miners in a typical extreme mining environment in China were surveyed. The study hypotheses were tested using a structural equation model and an employee loyalty model, followed by empirical testing of the models. Employee loyalty was significantly associated with enterprise image and employee satisfaction, work quality indirectly affected loyalty through satisfaction, and the impact of switching costs on employee loyalty was not significant. We provide strong empirical evidence to help enterprises improve sustainable human resource management and regulatory policies, with important implications for safety production. Our study also provides a useful reference for further studies of sustainable human resource management in mining.

АНАЛІЗ МЕТОДІВ ТА ПІДХОДІВ ОЦІНКИ МАШИН І ОБЛАДНАННЯ НА КОНКУРЕНТОСПРОМОЖНІСТЬ В ІСТОРИЧНІЙ РЕТРОСПЕКТИВІ

Modern economics has developed a huge number of scientific methods and approaches to assess the efficiency and competitiveness of production and use of fixed assets. Machinery and equipment are not only the final product of consumption, but also a source for the production of new goods or services for profit. Based on this specificity of fixed assets, there are so many methodological approaches that sometimes duplicate each other, complement or simply are only a partial solution to the task assigned to them. Therefore, the analysis of the emergence of methods for assessing the competitiveness of machinery and equipment is relevant and of practical importance. The aim of the article is to analyze the evolution of methods of evaluating machines and equipment for competitiveness. The following scientific methods were used during the research: analysis and synthesis, deductive method, analogy method, modeling, system approach, abstraction method. The study found that a large number of scientific methods and approaches are used to determine the competitiveness of fixed assets. One of the first practical methods of evaluation was the use of indicators of general and comparative efficiency, which were an inefficient approach that did not provide an assessment of multifunctional methods. The solution to these problems was the development and application of differential, integral and mixed coefficients of competitiveness. But they are very difficult to use in a competitive environment. They have been replaced by costly, market-based and profitable approaches to assessing the competitiveness of equipment. In the current environment, it is difficult for them to gather information from ordinary producers, so they come to the aid of the proposed approach of M. Porter and other researchers who have developed his ideas through boundary analysis. Thus, scientific approaches and methods of assessing the competitiveness of technology have come a long way from determining the efficiency of equipment on the main indicator, integrated methods to the limit and institutional criteria. Each method has the right to life and practical use in economic activities of enterprises.