Economic models are critical for business success because they can be used to determine the costs and benefits associated with making a business decision. As the economy moves away from traditional goods and towards delivering services, the need for an accurate economic model for evaluating software-development decisions of service-delivering businesses is paramount. More specifically, the research problem is to develop an economic model for the development, maintenance, and evolution of

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... e systems in support of B2C services. In this paper, we describe our work on an initial economics-modeling framework for applications, following the service-oriented architecture style. We present methods for calculating both the cost of developing a new service and the value generated by introducing the service to the market. The conjunction of these two concepts enables the estimation of a business's ROI when new software development is required to deliver a new service. An example study demonstrates the concepts described herein.