Profit sharing in service composition

Abstract

Component services are often provided by different organizations, which needs to determine how to divide the profit obtained for the composite service to the component service providers. Previous studies have mainly focused on the process of aggregating multiple component services into a composite service. However, the process of the profit sharing has not yet discussed sufficiently. This problem can be formalized as a coalition game in the game theory. However, its flexibility of defining the policy of utilizing the services causes a problem. This paper shows that the existing profit sharing methods, more precisely, neither the equal division method nor the division method based on the Shapley value cannot satisfy the following two desiderata; (1) the sufficient level of service provision is attained, and (2) component services are not broken up more than is necessary. Moreover, we examine what factors make difficult to attain the sufficient level of service provision, and give a discussion toward mitigating this problem. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.