In April 2009, one of the authors of this book, Thomas Meinl, was attending the World Wide Web conference in Madrid, Spain. There, he gave a talk, in which he presented the idea of Web service reservation via derivative mechanisms. During the following discussions, it became clear that for many researchers, practitioners and managers this topic, while it even only scratched basic economic and financial principles, without going into any mathematical details, was still completely beyond their scope. This became even more surprising when bearing in mind that, as most Web services are built in order to generate some quantitative (financial) profit, the related economic aspects should be considered from the very start. Therefore, even if economic issues were, are and should not be the main concern of Web service developers and decision makers, Thomas Meinl figured that it could prove to be advantageous if they had at least a general notion of the processes following their work.

Therefore, the idea came up to write a book that would make both these basic relationships and deeper economic coherencies accessible to a wider audience, in this case, an audience particularly belonging to what is known as the Web community. It was clear from the very beginning that such a book should, on the one hand, contain parts that are hands-on so that the economic principles and foundations presented there could be applied directly without necessarily consulting further literature. On the other hand, we deliberately aimed to also include more theoretic contents in order to also provide for a deeper mathematical background of the economic aspects to be presented. In order to account for a hands-on as well as a deeply theoretically founded perspective, the scope of this book covers established economic results on the hand and recent developments on the other hand. Yet, it is presented in a style that makes it comprehensible to the above mentioned audience. Thus, the purpose of the book is to pinpoint the relevance of economic principles in the vast field ofWeb services, andWeb service networks, in particular, that has been considered largely from a technical perspective so far. In this vein, basic principles shall be illustrated by demonstrative examples and, where possible, extended onto Web services directly.