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In the service economy era, service value is created from the evaluation of customer experience and it is important to study alliance partner selection for improving service provision. Nevertheless, most of the existing alliance partner selection approaches concentrate on the functional aspects. The purpose of this paper is to provide a novel approach that is customer-centric and emphasizes the emotional aspect of service value.

This paper presents a metaphor-based alliance partner recommendation mechanism (MAPRM) that employs the computing metaphor approach to recommend alliance partners for companies in an innovative way. The main ideas of metaphors are the comparison made between two unlike things that actually have something in common so as to attain innovative thinking.

This study uses the scenario of regional tourism innovation to demonstrate the attempted contributions of MAPRM. The simulation evaluation results show that MAPRM can utilize knowledge and resources from companies to achieve specific alliance goals of satisfying desired customer experiences represented by images that can be analyzed and created based on customers’ feedback and their interactions with companies.

MAPRM aims to assist companies to find appropriate alliance partners which offer potential innovation opportunities for service value provision. It is capable of facilitating the alliance partner selection process and assessing customers’ needs at the same time.

Most existing recommendation systems or technologies are functional-oriented. Recommending services, nevertheless, requires the consideration of service experiences perceived by customers being individually unique and emphasizing the emotional experiences and the co-created value-in-use. This paper aims to present a new recommender system to capture customer emotional needs and address social interactions among service stakeholders.

This paper presents a color imagery-based recommender system (CIRS) capable of capturing customer emotional needs and addressing social interactions among service stakeholders that can collectively co-create the individual value-in-use and beneficial outcomes for customers. Based on the Color Image Scale, the recommender system uses the color imagery format as the uniform representation of customers’ psychological expectations, service providers and the service system, to facilitate the scoring and ranking of recommendations.

This study uses an application context of destination tourism to demonstrate and justify the recommender system’s attempted contributions preliminarily. That is, CIRS can recommend destinations and tour services that meet tourists’ emotional needs with a satisfactory precision of 70 per cent. CIRS can also make stakeholders’ image models evolve over time considering the dynamic interactions among stakeholders. CIRS can also help lesser-known tourism destinations be discovered by tourists who can be emotionally satisfied.

CIRS uses the color imagery as the uniform representation for customers’ expectations, service providers (e.g. small and medium enterprises) and service system (e.g. tourism destinations), considering the continued interactions among the service stakeholders that collectively co-create the individual value-in-use and beneficial outcomes for each customer.

Online advertisement brings huge revenue to many websites. There are many types of online advertisement; this paper aims to focus on the online banner ads which are usually placed in a particular news website. The investigated news website adopts a pay-per-ad payment model, where the advertisers are charged when they rent a banner from the website during a particular period. In this payment model, the website needs to ensure that the ad pushed frequency of each ad on the banner is similar. Under such advertisement push rules, an ad-recommendation mechanism considering ad push fairness is required.

The authors proposed a novel ad recommendation method that considers both ad-push fairness and personal interests. The authors take every ad’s exposure time into consideration and investigate users’ three different usage experiences in the website to identify the main factors affecting the interests of users. Online ad recommendation is conducted on the investigated news website.

The results of the experiments show that the proposed approach performs better than the traditional approach. This method can not only enhance the average click rate of all ads in the website but also ensure reasonable fairness of exposure frequency of each ad. The online experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Existing researches had not considered both the advertisement recommendation and ad-push fairness together. With the proposed novel ad recommendation model, the authors can improve the ad click-through rate of ads with reasonable push fairness. The website provider can thereby increase the commercial value of advertising and user satisfaction.

Due to the rapidly increasing volume of users and products in virtual worlds, recommender systems are an important feature in virtual worlds; they can help solve information overload problems. Virtual world users are able to perform several actions that promote the enjoyment of their virtual life, including interacting with others, visiting virtual houses and shopping for virtual products. This study aims to concentrate on the following two important factors: the social neighbors’ influences and the virtual house bandwagon phenomenon, which affects users’ preferences during their virtual house visits and purchasing processes.

The authors determine social influence by considering the interactions between the target user and social circle neighbors. The degree of influence of the virtual house bandwagon effect is derived by analyzing the preferences of the virtual house hosts who have been visited by target users during their successive visits. A novel hybrid recommendation method is proposed herein to predict users’ preferences by combining the analyses of both factors.

The recommendation performance of the proposed method is evaluated by conducting experiments with a data set collected from a virtual world platform. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional recommendation methods, and they also exhibit the effectiveness of considering both the social influence and the virtual house bandwagon effect for making effective recommendations.

Existing studies on recommendation methods did not investigate the virtual house bandwagon effects that are unique to the virtual worlds. The novel idea of the virtual house bandwagon effect is proposed and analyzed for predicting users’ preferences. Moreover, a novel hybrid recommendation approach is proposed herein for generating virtual product recommendations. The proposed approach is able to improve the accuracy of preference predictions and enhance the innovative value of recommender systems for virtual worlds.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of other customer's opinion on a service firm and its alliance on the evaluation of the airline by the focal customer by integrating qualitative and quantitative user-generated content. The study also explores the relative importance of core and peripheral attributes in consumer evaluations.

A text mining and natural language processing-based approach was followed to extract insights from the qualitative part of 18,457 consumer reviews, which were later analyzed along with the quantitative information obtained from the reviews using linear regression and logistic regression methods.

The authors found that customer satisfaction and recommendation behavior is formed by own and others' opinion about the airline and alliance. The relative importance of the core and peripheral attributes depends on the psychological distance from the evaluation of the attribute.

The theoretical contribution and managerial implications have been discussed in detail.

It helps in review management strategy, service design strategy and the alliance and partnership strategies of the airlines.

This is the first paper that explores the impact attribute-level evaluations found in prior reviews on the future reviews of customers. It also explores the effect of prior reviews in the context of a service business and its alliances.

To review the alliance partner selection criteria research in order to shed light on how entrepreneurial firms should choose established firms as alliance partners.

Critical differences between entrepreneurial and established firms are presented to emphasize the special risks in alliances between these two types of firms. Extant literature on partner selection criteria is reviewed to show that adequate research adopting the perspective of entrepreneurial firms is lacking. A list of recommendations is developed for entrepreneurial firms in their choice of established firms as alliance partners. Illustrative cases are presented of both successful and unsuccessful cases of strategic alliances between entrepreneurial and established firms.

Provides evidence that entrepreneurial firms have not been adequately recognized in the research on partner selection criteria in strategic alliances. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature, the paper identifies 15 intrinsic and alliancing difference factors between entrepreneurial and established firms.

Five key guidelines are developed to assist entrepreneurial firms in selecting established firms as alliance partners.

This paper fills a gap in the two literatures on entrepreneurship and strategic alliances regarding research‐based guidance available for entrepreneurial firms in the selection of established firms as partners in strategic alliances.

The alliance governance – whether equity or non-equity based – through which an alliance is governed serves as a mechanism to protect a firm from partner's opportunistic behavior, manage resource dependence and facilitate knowledge sharing. Alliance governance structure also reflects the risk, reward and control that partners perceive in a relationship. In light of the conflicts and instabilities reported in strategic alliances, the purpose of this paper is to examine the interorganizational domain that affects the endurance and continuity of collaboration and explain how the alliance interface contexts determines the structuring of alliance governance.

An empirical examination of 179 strategic alliances, using survey and archival data conducted to test the hypothesized relationship between the choice of governance structure and the complexity of alliance task, balance of power and competitive scope between partners.

A multinomial logistic regression of the hypothesized variables revealed that the complexity of alliance task, balance of power, and competitive scope between partners are significantly related to the mode of alliance governance – whether non-equity, minority-equity, or joint venture.

This study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the relationships between the contextual factors such as the alliance task, power dynamics, and competitive scope that shape the collaboration and structuring of appropriate alliance governance mode. Results of the study provide strong evidence for the hypotheses that the greater the task complexity, and greater the balance of power and scope of competition between partners, the alliance governance tends to be equity or joint venture based. Consistent with recommendations of several organizational scholars that the theory of alliance governance and performance must shift from individual partner firm to interaction domain and interface contexts (Luo, 2002; Gray and Wood, 1991; Oxley and Sampson, 2004), this study integrally examined the dyadic issues such as balance of power, task complexity, and the competitive scope and the dynamic role they play in decisions pertaining to alliance governance. While many extant studies on the choice of alliance governance structure have employed secondary data sources, the study employed data from survey measures (Gulati, 1995; Teng and Das, 2008; Oxley and Sampson, 2004) enhancing the validity of the results.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of trust in the relationships and long‐term commitment between partners in strategic alliances. A framework is developed for better understanding the role of trust in the performance of strategic alliances in a cross‐cultural context.

The empirical findings of this study are gathered from structured and unstructured interviews with some key actors involved in the process of forming strategic alliances in their own organizations; a case study of the oil industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which illustrates this is analysed. Qualitative analysis is conducted to assess the role of trust in this cross‐cultural context.

It was noted that building trust between partners helped to avoid bureaucratic obstructions and enhanced the decision making process in the UAE. It was found that trust helped partners to exchange resources faster, devote more funds to the venture and exchange knowledge and information smoothly. The results clearly show that trust plays an important role in building well‐functioning relationships in the oil and gas industry.

This study is limited to the UAE and can be generalized to other similar cultural contexts only to a certain extent. Future research should consider the same parameters in order to fully generalize the results to other industries.

The paper presents a case study of the nature and characteristics of partners in the oil and gas industry, which may be applied to other similar industries. It is hoped that presenting practical tools for understanding the function of trust in strategic alliance performance may be useful.

This framework makes two major contributions; first, it explores a subject which has been under‐researched in the literature, that is, the issue of trust between partners of strategic alliances in a developing context; and, second, it leads to a set of recommendations and benchmarks the practitioners in the UAE and similar contexts to help them increase the trust between partners in strategic alliances.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to attempt to answer the related questions of how and why supply chain partners are chosen. Research objectives are to understand how and why collaborative partners are chosen, by learning the actual decision‐making processes and key factors in partner selection.

A mixed methods approach was chosen, comprising: a focused literature review, to identify key issues, and informal interviews, leading to the development of a Partner Negotiation Model; a multiple case study approach, involving formal interviews about two partnerships, supplemented by documentation, contracts, correspondence and other records; and some manual data analysis and a qualitative research tool. The whole resulted in identification of significant issues for partner negotiation and selection.

Contrary to accepted theory in the alliance, partner selection, and decision‐making literature, the results show that alliance partners are chosen through a complex negotiation process rather than rational selection. The research and interviews with software industry collaborators suggest roles for factors such as complexity, cyclic negotiation, several types of partners, several levels of alliance formation, and hidden factors, such as personal friendship or perceived reputation. Overall, the problem of collaborative partner selection was found to be much more complex than expected.

Research results are limited by the small sample of partnerships reviewed, but the results can be used as a starting‐point for further larger‐scale studies.

Supply chain partners in business can use these results to help them better understand the process and criteria for future supply partner selection.

The results may be used to develop a set of partner selection recommendations for practitioners. For specific firms that become involved in organizing supply chain alliances, the results of this work will provide decision support in terms of choosing among partners or indeed whether to engage in a particular relationship.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.