Value-Added Analysis of Bi-Lateral e-Business Services

Broker-based bi-lateral services are a dominant e-business morphology in which a broker (B) aggregates a large number of services offered by different providers (P) on a centralized platform, and these services are re-organized, composed and provided to a large number of customers (C). The broker, customers, and providers are all faced with various tactical issues that require specific decision-making, e. g., which customers/providers and how many will a broker aggregate, which broker's services will a customer select, and which broker will a provider join. The process of looking for an optimized decision is affected by various factors. In this paper, the logical relationships between four types of services (atomic, aggregated, composite, and common services) are described, and then a quantitative theoretical analysis of the value-added of B, C, and P is made based on three value-added mechanisms, namely service aggregation, service composition and the aggregation of a mass number of customers. Based on the analysis, three real-life broker-based e-business services are briefly discussed.