Improving Trust in Electronic Marketplaces for Industrial Services

Topic
Type: 
Master Thesis
Supervisor: 
Jürgen Dorn
Description: 
A focus shift towards customized solutions produced by industrial corporations is forced by market requirements. Rather than providing simple mass products, an industrial service provider tends to produce a so-called product-service bundles, where along with physical product a service is supplied as well. Production of such bundles led to the idea of Industrial Product Service Systems (IPPS) - a marketable set of products and services. Delivering services along physical products requires a change in paradigm of relations between manufacturing companies and buyers. There is a need for a platform where two parties can trade complex solutions - services. In this context a service is an application of competencies and resources to solve a customer problem in B2B environment. An example of service could be construction, delivery and installation of steel plant, the provision of a consultancy service for production company, the delivery of casting parts produces according customer drawings including engineering and quality services or a system development and industrialization process of a motor or a car. Unlike classical product markets, trading services is a more complex process. The nature of simple products allows them to be compared among each other, whereas services are difficult to asses. Heterogenic nature of services introduces complexity, as there are no common properties upon which they can be compared against. Product e-markets such as Amazon or E-bay offer customers to search and filter contents (based on price, CPU speed, storage space, etc.), but services cannot be described in the same way. For example, what properties can be described for consultancy process? The quality of such service depends on the service provider and on the customer as well, because customer requires this service for a customer-specific problem. Thus there is a need for platform (service market) which would enable service comparison based on the trustiness of a service offer and its provider. In this context, the scientific problem is lack of trust in services (and service stakeholders). This problem has a direct effect on service consumers - they are not able to utilize electronic marketplaces to its full potential. Therefore the question to be answered is: How can trust into complex services be improved in electronic marketplaces?
Language: 
English
State: 
assigned
Issued: 
01.12.2017
Student
First name: 
Ivan
Last name: 
Pryakhin
Matr nr: 
1028223
KNZ: 
537
Started: 
01.12.2017