Title: Profit maximisation in long-term e-service agreements

Authors: Hussain Aljafer; Zaki Malik; Khayyam Hashmi; M. Mustafa Rafique

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, USA ' Department of Business Analytics, Texas A&M University – Commerce, USA ' Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, USA ' Department of Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

Abstract: Due to the wide spread use of web-based services, there is competition among service providers to attract the highest number of users either by the competitive pricing of the services, by performance of the services, or both. In this paper, we address this matter by proposing a web service pricing model for the service providers to help generate the highest profit. We dynamically alter the price, based on the market equilibrium techniques to achieve the maximum resource distribution. Our approach also tackles the problem of resources that have low or no demand by the users, by generating bundles such that these resources can be distributed, and generate more profit. Finally, the approach utilises an automated negotiation mechanism for service replacement where we may have an offer from a new user resulting in more profit, but there are not enough resources.

Keywords: web service; long-term profit; service-level agreement; information system.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2021.113970

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2021 Vol.36 No.4, pp.506 - 526

Received: 08 Sep 2018
Accepted: 18 Dec 2018
Published online: 06 Apr 2021 *

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