Online storage service providers grant a way for companies to avoid spending resources on maintaining their own in-house storage infrastructure and thereby allowing them to focus on their core business activities. These providers, however, follow a fixed, posted pricing strategy that charges the same price in each time period and thus bear all the risk arising out of demand uncertainties faced by their client companies. We examine the effects of providing a spot market with dynamic prices and forward contracts to hedge against future revenue uncertainty. We derive revenue-maximizing spot and forward prices for a single seller facing a known set of buyers. We perform a simulation study using publicly available traffic data regarding Amazon S3 clients from Alexa.com to validate our analytical results. Our field study supports our analysis and indicates that spot markets alone can enhance revenues to Amazon, but this comes at the cost of increased risks due to the increased market share in the spot markets. Furthermore, adding a forward contract feature to the spot markets can reduce risks while still providing the benefits of enhanced revenues. Although the buyers incur an increase in costs in the spot market, adding a forward contract does not cause any additional cost increase while transferring the risk to the buyers. Thus, storage grid providers can greatly benefit by applying a forward contract alongside the spot market.
Blogs have emerged as an innovative tool for sharing information and knowledge, and they command significant interest from information technology (IT) users as well as providers. Our study establishes a research framework to provide an understanding of the factors affecting knowledge sharing among bloggers in online social networks. The research results indicate that bloggers' trust, strength of social ties, and reciprocity all have a positive effect on their knowledge-sharing behavior. Further, the impact of each factor on such behavior varies by gender. Our results provide evidence that offline expected social norms tend to persist in the online blogosphere and that gender differences need to be considered as a significant factor in understanding the IT usage behavior in the context of social capital theory. For IT managers and blog service providers, our results also highlight the importance of being gender aware in an effort to elicit participation from all constituent members for the successful adoption and usage of blogs as a knowledge-sharing mechanism.