Retailer selection in future open competitive communications environments

The highly competitive communications markets of the future should encompass mechanisms for enabling users to find and associate with the most appropriate retailers, i.e. those offering at a certain time period adequate quality services in a cost efficient manner. This paper presents such mechanisms. Our starting point is the definition of a business case, through which the role of the best candidate-retailer selection problem is explained. In the sequel, the problem is analysed and the identified sub-problems are concisely defined, mathematically formulated and solved. The identified components of the best candidate-retailer selection problem involve the evaluation of the quality of a retailer offer and the reduction of the set of candidate retailers by exploiting learning from experience notions. In the final sections, results are provided and concluding remarks are made.