Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.

Análisis de las estrategias adoptadas y difundidas por las cadenas hoteleras

[ES] Las cadenas hoteleras se enfrentan a importantes retos. Por una parte, el complejo entorno en el que se desenvuelve la industria turística les exige definir, desarrollar y gestionar sus estrategias para garantizar su supervivencia. Pero además, el mercado está demandando de forma creciente información fluida para conocer las estrategias y expectativas empresariales de futuro de las compañías. Por ello, la contribución de este trabajo es doble.

Hago click y opero a tu lado: Estrategia de la banca online en España

[ES] La estrategia de la Banca española con respecto a Internet se ha enmarcado entre la modernización del sector y el miedo a la competencia de terceras partes. En el artículo mostramos como, desde la efervescencia inicial, las entidades se han centrado en construir un negocio rentable parte de una estrategia multicanal. Sin embargo todavía las instituciones españolas no han conseguido aprovechar todas las ventajas que presenta Internet a la hora de facilitar la comercialización de productos financieros.

Joan Robinson Was Almost Right: Output under Third-Degree Price Discrimination

In this paper, we show that in order for third-degree price discrimination to increase total output, the demands of the strong markets should be, as conjectured by Robinson (1933), more concave than the demands of the weak markets. By making the distinction between adjusted concavity of the inverse demand and adjusted concavity of the direct demand, we are able to state necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for third-degree price discrimination to increase total output.