Publications

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Service management and design has largely focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the “service experience” is primarily determined during this final “service encounter” that takes place in the “front stage.” This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the “back stage” of the service value chain where materials or…

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There is one thing that moves online consumers to click “add to cart,” that allows sellers to accept certain forms of online payment, and that makes online product reviews meaningful: trust. Without trust, online interactions can’t advance. But how is trust among strangers established on the Internet? What role does reputation play in the formation of online trust? In eTrust,…

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The concept of location has become very popular in many applications on the Web, in particular for those which aim at connecting the real world with resources on the Web. However, the Web as it is today has no overall location concept, which means that applications have to introduce their own location concepts and have done so in incompatible ways. On the other hand, there are a number of…
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This paper contributes to the study of self-presentation in online dating systems by performing a factor analysis on the text portions of online profiles. Findings include a similarity in the overall factor structures between male and female profiles, including use of tentative words by men. Contrasts between sexes were also found in a cluster analysis of the profiles using their factor scores.…
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This paper presents the first examination of the growing phenomenon of multi-author, or group blogs. Using a large collection of blog posts gathered over an eight month period, we conducted some quantitative assessments. Multi-author blogs were found to differ significantly from single-and-two author blogs on several quality metrics, including having longer posts on average and being ranked…
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Why the Google Book Search settlement agreement under consideration could result in an extensive restructuring of the book industry.
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Skilled immigrants have achieved great success in founding U.S. engineering and technology startups, which have in turn contributed greatly to the country's economic growth over time. In this work we explore the educational attainment and career trajectories of these immigrant entrepreneurs. Our research confirms that advanced education in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and…

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The last decades have seen tremendous growth and transformation in the Internet's commercial landscape. Underneath this success, however, the underlying network architecture has shown a marked resistance to change; it is now described as stagnant and ossified. Numerous design proposals have been developed by researchers, implemented in code, and written right into the routers and end-systems…

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The dissertation looks at the practice of software development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — a place at the periphery of the global world of software development. Software development is often conceptualized as a placeless field of endeavor. At the same time software work is highly concentrated, with "right" and "wrong" places to do it. Ethnographic data from a "wrong place" helps challenge some…

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Many of the most complex service systems being built and imagined today combine person-to-person encounters, technology-enhanced encounters, self-service, computational services, multi-channel, multidevice, and location-based and context-aware services. This paper examines the characteristic concerns and methods for these seven different design contexts to propose a unifying view that spans them…
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This dissertation is a collection of papers quite varied in the methods used and the topics examined. Common to them all is a focus on the use of information and the use of experiments and quantitative methods for the analysis. In the three experiments I look at the question of monetizing information goods available on the internet; issues of privacy where personal information is the main…