Informatica

The article investigates the Swedish retail banks' application of price bundling in order to attract new customers, students. This is done through a customer survey about students' preferences concerning retail banking services, their price sensitiveness and banking behaviour. The conjoint analysis results showed that the students had relatively heterogeneous preferences, and four distinguishing segments could be found among them, namely a) plain banking, b) cheapest banking, c) modern banking, and d) traditional banking. The central factor in attracting students is the choice of services that are included in the bundle, and not the price. There were only roughly 20 percent who currently had a student bundle.

In this paper we consider the problem of the distributed deadlock resolution. Starting from a high level specification of the problem and the resolution algorithm for a system with single request model, we provide successive levels of decreasing abstraction of the initial specification in order to achieve a solution in a complete distributed system. The successive refinements and the final distributed deadlock resolution algorithm are formaly described and proved by using the Input-Output Automata Model. The proposed solution is a modification of the algorithms in Mitchell and Merritt (1984) and Gonzalez de Mendívil et al. (1993) and preserves a similar message traffic to resolve a deadlock.