Capacity Expansions with Bundled Supplies of Attributes: An Application to Server Procurement in Cloud Computing

To address the growing obesity crisis, governments are promoting home cooking to improve dietary habits. Home-cooked food-sharing platforms, a manifestation of the sharing economy, offer consumers healthy food options. While the economic benefits of the sharing economy have been extensively studied, little is known about its impact on non-economic factors, such as consumers’ health. To address this gap, we conduct an empirical study using data from a mobile kitchen-sharing platform and four controlled experiments to investigate whether the sharing economy helps consumers develop healthy eating habits. We use manual coding and machine learning methods to evaluate the healthiness of over 180,000 unique dishes and examine food provision and consumption on the platform. Our findings indicate that as consumers use the platform more frequently, they tend to consume more unhealthy food. Additionally, sellers who receive more orders and earn more revenue tend to offer less healthy food over time. Two controlled experiments prove consumers are more likely to order unhealthy food online. Furthermore, these experiments provide causal evidence that consumer food consumption patterns drive seller food provision rather than vice versa. Our results suggest that the sharing economy may have negative consequences due to misaligned interests between sellers and consumers. Fortunately, we identify conditions that may mitigate these effects in empirical analyses and two experiments. Specifically, consumers who choose dine-in options (as opposed to takeaway) and those who order for groups (as opposed to individual orders) tend to make healthier food choices on the platform due to impression management motivation.

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sizzle or Fizzle? Supply and Consumption Dynamics of Home-Cooked Food on Sharing Platform

Li,

Wang,

Huang

et al. 2024

“…When production and operations management entered the era of Industry 4.0, innovations of digital technologies and automation technologies, such as cloud computing (Arbabian et al 2021), AI and machine learning (Simester et al 2020), blockchain (Babich and Hilary 2020), data analytics (Choi et al 2018), and autonomous vehicles (Naumov et al 2020), have reshaped many industries (Dai et al 2020) and have caught scholars' attention.…”

Section: Technology Innovationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Sharing Economy Technology Disrupt Incumbents? Exploring the Influences of Mobile Digital Freight Matching Platforms on Road Freight Logistics Firms

Zhou

Wan

2022

In this paper, we study the disruptive power of the mobile digital sharing economy to the road freight logistics industry. New information technologies, such as the mobile internet, mobile payment methods, and GPS, have enabled platforms to match freight shippers’ demand with carriers’ supply by utilizing the convenience and mobility of smartphones. We empirically study the influence of the emergence of mobile digital freight matching platforms in the U.S. on the profitability and stock performance of two types of incumbent road freight logistics companies: freight arrangement companies (freight forwarders and brokers) and trucking companies (freight carriers). Since the mobile digital freight matching platforms mainly match small and mid‐sized trucking companies with shipping demand, we expect the platforms to introduce interference (direct) competition to traditional freight arrangement companies and exploitation (indirect) competition to large trucking companies, which potentially raises operational challenges for both types of incumbents. We use Difference‐in‐Differences (DID) analyses to study the incumbents’ profitability and the event study method to evaluate their stock performance. We find that after the advent of the mobile digital freight matching platforms in the U.S., the profitability of the traditional freight arrangement companies counter‐intuitively remained unchanged. In contrast, the profitability of the large trucking companies increased. Furthermore, we examine the changes in sales and costs behind these profitability changes. Our dynamic analyses suggest a time lag of the influence of the mobile digital freight matching platforms. Besides, we find that the stock value of the traditional freight arrangement companies received a significant negative shock, whereas the stock value of the large trucking companies showed no significant reaction. This study contributes to understanding the disruptive power of an emerging technology innovation of sharing economy to firm performances in an increasingly competitive and innovative business environment.

“…To explore this challenge, Arbabian et al. (2021) analyze a two‐resource capacity‐expansion problem where a cloud infrastructure provider adopts two server configurations with different CPU/RAM ratios, which differs from the single‐resource capacity model in many studies.…”

Section: Saas Operationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing Software‐as‐a‐Service: Pricing and operations

Kumar

2022

Software‐as‐a‐service (SaaS) applications have experienced a decade of explosive growth, eliminating barriers in reaching users and enabling real‐time interchanges and intelligence. Using business analytics, SaaS applications are increasingly embedded in the day‐to‐day activities of businesses and consumers with competition and innovative pricing. Due to the evolution in cloud business models, new issues are surfacing to challenge practitioners and scholars. A number of issues encountered in the practice have not been properly addressed or even recognized. In this paper, we attempt to fill this important gap. We propose a framework of recent business research on SaaS in light of wide adoption of the SaaS business model. This framework broadly classifies SaaS research into two basic themes. For each theme, we review past work that has been instrumental in setting the direction of this line of research and discuss how emerging research opportunities can be addressed. For each research opportunity, we also propose an initial model and the applicable methodology. Further, in order to aid researchers, we identify the data sources wherever applicable, and even present some of the initial results. We conclude by describing promising directions on a roadmap for future research and explain why an integrative perspective of operations, marketing, and information systems is critical to SaaS. In this paper, we bridge the gap between research and practice by identifying the relevant industry problems that would help researchers who are interested in working in this area both to get a starting point and to address important theoretical and practical challenges.