Value Ecosystems of Web Services : Benefits and Costs of Web as a Prosuming Service Platform

We first develop a value ecosystem framework to model the SDP(Service Delivery Process) of web services. Since the web service has been evolving from the basic web architecture (e.g., traditional world wide web) to a prosuming platform based on virtualization technologies, the proposed framework of the value ecosystem focuses on capturing the key characteristics of SDP in each type of web services. Even though they share the basic elements such as PP(Platform Provider), CA(Customization Agency) and user group, the SDP in the traditional web services (so-called Web1.0 in this paper) is quite different from the most recent one (so-called Web2.0). In our value ecosystem, users are uniformly distributed over (0, ), where ��represents the variety level of users' preference on the web service level. PP and CA provide a standard level of web service(s) and prosuming service package, respectively. CA in Web1.0 presents a standard customization package() at flat rate c, whereas PP and CA collaborate and provide customization service with a usage-based scheme. We employ a multi-stage game model to analyze and compare the SDPs in Web1.0 and Web2.0. Our findings through analysis and numerical simulations are as follows. First, the user group is consecutively segmented, and the pattern of the segmentations varies across Web1.0 and Web2.0. The standardized service level s (from PP) is higher in Web1.0, whereas the amount of information created in the value ecosystem is bigger in Web2.0. This indicates the role of CA would be increasingly critical in Web2.0: in particular, for fulfilling the needs of prosuming and service customization.