The clock is ticking—Or is it? Customer satisfaction response to waiting shorter vs. longer than expected during a service encounter

Customer waits are commonplace in retail settings. To develop efficient wait management strategies, retailers need insights into how customers respond to waiting during service encounters. An intuitive insight supported by extensive research is that a longer wait duration decreases customer satisfaction. However, the same wait duration might have different effects on customers depending on whether it is shorter or longer than what customers expected. To address this question, we draw upon the research on time value and predict asymmetry in the customer satisfaction response to waiting shorter versus longer than expected: Though the clock is often said to be ticking, waiting longer than expected leads to a minor decrease in satisfaction, whereas waiting shorter than expected substantially increases satisfaction. We provide evidence for this asymmetric effect across three studies and identify two boundary conditions: if the source of the expectation is external (e.g., wait time estimate provided by the retailer) or if the wait is much longer than expected. Overall, our research encourages retailers to put the customer response to waiting into perspective: Customers will tolerate waiting longer than expected, up to a certain point.     

Investigating the impact of service line formats on satisfaction with waiting

In this paper, we examine whether the format of service lines affects customers’ satisfaction with their queuing experience. Using a goal-theoretic approach, and data from a series of experimental studies, we show that the duration of the wait moderates the psychological tradeoff between the initial queue length and its rate of movement, such that customers prefer a single line format for shorter waits but a multiple line format for longer waits. We also show that satisfaction declines with an increase in the number of stages in service lines. This adverse effect of multi-staging can be mitigated by using information devices as well as orienting customers away from local, stage-specific, sub-goals towards the overall goal of receiving service and exiting the system. We synthesize these findings about the psychophysics of queuing to generalize a model of satisfaction with waiting that accounts for the effect of service line formats and can represent customers’ utility functions in models of queuing systems.     

Let Users Generate Your Video Ads? The Impact of Video Source and Quality on Consumers' Perceptions and Intended Behaviors

The advent of social media has challenged companies as sole creators of marketing messages. Whether intentionally branded or subconsciously promoted, users become ambassadors for products and brands by producing and disseminating user-generated content (UGC). Whereas previous studies on UGC have mainly considered verbal peer recommendations or written reviews, our research focuses on user-generated videos (UGVs). In our 2 (source: user vs. agency) × 2 (technical quality: low vs. high) experimental study, we explore the impact of user-generated videos (UGVs) vs. agency-generated videos (AGVs) on spectators' perceived source credibility and their intention to visit the tourist destination Tyrol in Austria, as promoted in the video. In addition, we explore the moderating role of video quality. In contrast to conventional wisdom, our results indicate that there is no general superiority of UGVs over AGVs. Rather, the influence of different video generators (user vs. agency) on spectators' perception and intended behavior depends on the technical quality of the video. In the case of low technical quality, users as generators have a significantly stronger positive effect on source trustworthiness and expertise – and thereby on consumers' intended behaviors – than AGVs. However, no impact from the generating source on trustworthiness has been found under the condition of highly technical quality. Concerning source expertise, videos generated by users are rated more highly than agency-generated videos under both low and high technical qualities, but the advantage is significantly lower under high technical quality. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of user-generated content overall and relativize the widely assumed general superiority of user-generated content over commercial, firm-generated content, at least in the case of videos.     

基于可信度计算的分布式共识合作感知算法

对于分布式的认知无线网络,由于不存在融合中心节点,次级用户节点之间的合作感知往往 采用信息交互的渠道进行,其中一种基于共识合作的感知机制受到广泛的研究,但这种机制 在鲁棒性方面存在一定的缺陷,当恶意节点存在时,其错误信息将影响局部的感知判决结果 ,为此,提出一种基于感知节点可信度的共识合作感知机制。在该机制中,各节点对邻居节 点的可信度进行计算,并把计算出的可信度值发送给其他节点,通过对各节点可信度的累加 计算,最终计算出各节点的可信度,各节点以此决定是否与其邻居节点合作以及如何合作。 仿真结果证明,在恶意节点存在的情况下,该算法在感知性能和收敛速度上都较未改进算法 有不同程度的提升,减轻了不可靠节点对合作感知结果的影响。     

时间间隔何时能够提高在线评论的有用性感知——基于归因理论的视角

文章从归因理论的视角出发,探索了购买与评论间的时间间隔与产品类型（物质性产品Vs体验性产品）如何相互作用以影响评论的有用性感知。通过将产品分为物质性产品和体验性产品,文章运用实验检验了时间间隔对不同产品类型的评论影响作用产生的不同作用。结果表明,对于体验型产品来说,时间间隔近（Vs远）可以提高评论的有用性感知;而对于物质型产品来说,时间间隔近（Vs远）可以降低评论的有用性感知。除此之外,实验结果也证实归因倾向中介于时间间隔与评论有用性感知。但是时间间隔对评论有用性的影响还会受到评论效价的调节,时间间隔只会改变正面评论的有用性感知,但是并不能显著影响负面评论。研究结论有助于深入理解阅读者对在线评论的有用性判断的反应,并为在线零售商提供了一个更好利用和维护在线产品评论提高新的视角。     

Evaluating the impact of service user involvement on research: a prospective case study

As service user involvement in health and social care research has become more firmly embedded in health policies, both in the UK and internationally, there is increasing interest in evaluating its potential benefits and outcomes. Impact studies have highlighted a range of different types of service user involvement, using diverse research methods, within various research topics and involving different stakeholders. Potential benefits to research, researchers and the service users actively involved in research have been identified, along with the possibility of some negative consequences. Many impact studies have been criticized for being based on informal retrospective accounts of researchers and service users working together. Few have been underpinned by conceptual models, and there is a paucity of detailed accounts of the process of involvement that would enable replication. This paper reports an account of a prospective, qualitative exploration of service user involvement within a study, where the aims of the evaluation were agreed beforehand. Reflective discussions about the process and progress of service user involvement at different stages of the study were recorded, transcribed and analysed. The qualitative analysis identified perceived benefits to research, researchers and service user researchers that endorsed previous findings. The analysis also highlighted subjective and interpersonal aspects of service user involvement that have seldom been reported. This evaluation demonstrates the benefits of allowing time for structured reflection and adds to the understanding of the process and meaning of service user involvement in research.     

User preference mining based on fine-grained sentiment analysis

User preference mining is an application of data mining that attracts increasing attention. Although most of the existing user preference mining methods achieved significant performance improvement, the sentiment tendencies of users were seldom considered. This paper proposes fine-grained sentiment analysis for preference mining. The powerful feature representation capabilities of deep neural networks have significantly improved the performance of fine-grained sentiment analysis. But two main challenges remain when using deep neural network models: incomplete user feature extraction and insufficient interaction. In response, a pre-training language model is employed to encode user features to fully explore potential interests of users, a linguistic knowledge model is introduced to assist the encoding, a multi-scale convolution neural network is adopted to capture text features at different scales and fully utilize the text information, and the fine-grained sentiment analysis task is modeled as a sequence labeling problem to explore the sentiment polarity of user evaluation. Experiments on a user review data set are used to verify the new approach. Experimental results of precision, recall rate and F1-value show that the proposed approach performs better, and is more effective than baseline models. For example, the F1-value is increased by 4.27% compared to the best performing baseline model. Findings have important implications for research and practice.     

电商平台信用机制与用户嵌入性梯度效应及作用机制

电商交易流量红利趋于放缓的形势下,增强用户嵌入性、创造平台的长期价值成为电商平台治理面临的重要挑战。本文研究信用机制三个要素(印章、评价、契约)对用户嵌入性的递进梯度效应,同时,基于“认知-情感”框架,进一步揭示二者之间的中介机制,即在认知与情感双路径中间构建一条链式中介路径,最终形成双元反向链式中介模型。运用结构方程模型进行实证研究,结果表明:三个要素对用户嵌入性呈现逐级递增的正向影响,其中,风险感知与信任在印章、契约机制与用户嵌入关系中起到链式中介作用;评价机制对用户的信任影响不显著,而信用评价机制的规则设计、内容真实度是难以形成用户信任的主要原因。本研究对于拓展平台信用理论具有重要的启示,并为实践中如何构建信用体系和促进用户深度嵌入到平台进而创造平台的长期价值提供有益视角。     

Same Service,Different Ad Claims: The Moderating Role of Need for Cognition

Advertisers can choose among different ad claims when framing commercial messages about a new service offer. Two alternative ad claims are functional ad claims, focusing on product or service attributes and benefits, and experiential ad claims, focusing on future experiences with the product or service. This article proposes that different ad claims evoke different memory structures (semantic vs. episodic), and that different memory structures require different types of cognitive processing (system 1 vs. system 2). In two experiments using need for cognition as a dispositional trait of level of cognitive processing, this article shows that a new service entrant with experiential ad claims will be less favorably evaluated when consumers engage in more effortful, or system 2, processing, than when consumers engage in less effortful processing (system 1). For functional claims, however, the evaluation of the new service does not differ between the two types of cognitive processing (system 1 vs. system 2).     

Experts' assessment of the impact of electronic control on the operation of household appliances

The purpose of this study was to find out what effects electronics have on the operating characteristics of household appliances, and to analyse the differences' in attitudes towards these between male and female groups. The study method used was an expert inquiry. The experts represented different fields involved with household appliances. Nearly all the respondents agreed that the use of electronics in household appliances is likely to increase. Men took a much more positive attitude toward the prospect of using more electronics than women and were additionally more willing to choose an electronic model than an electromechanical one. Men considered that electronics allowed the development of more versatile, changeable and automatic appliances; while women were more likely to value safety, reliability and ease of operation. Results indicate that electronic appliances do not comply with all user demands today and most users need more and more advice in buying and using modern appliances.     

Visual attention to the main image of a hotel website based on its position,type of navigation and belonging to Millennial generation: An eye tracking study

This article focuses on the role played by the images that hotels use on their websites. Under this approach, this study analyses the main image used in a hotel website, considered an area of outstanding interest, which can help to improve the first impression when arriving at the website and, with it, increase the number of bookings. The absence of studies on this matter aroused the interest in it.The proposed experiment allows to check how these images influence the pattern or metrics of visual attention of users as well as their cognitive processing. The eye tracking technology was chosen with the intention of knowing several aspects of this fixation behaviour according to: the position of the image on the website, whether or not it belongs to the Millennial generation and the type of navigation it performs (exploratory vs. goal oriented), in addition to proposing some interaction effects between these classification variables studied.The results achieved revealed that an image in the upper area of a website is more effective, but there are some differences in the visual attention among groups of participants. This attention to it will depend, in part, on the type of task to be carried out within the website and the user age. Specifically, goal-oriented users showed a lower recurrent interest in the main image. The fixation was shorter in the group belonging to the Millennial generation, who do not need, given their greater experience in the web, a longer time to process the cognitive load of the image. Although the hypotheses proposed on the basis of the literature are not entirely satisfactory, the present study allows laying the foundations for more complex future works.     

Empathy with influencers? The impact of the sensory advertising experience on user behavioral responses

Short-form video influencer advertising offers new opportunities for user sensory experience to promote advertising effectiveness and induce positive user responses. This unique means of influencer-generated advertising via short-form videos has not yet been investigated. This study builds on the reciprocity norm of social exchange theory to investigate relationships among ad sensory stimuli (i.e., the sensory advertising experience), the efficacy of influencer advertising (i.e., empathy and altruistic motive), and user behavioral responses (i.e., ad avoidance intention, ad engagement, and purchase intention). It also seeks to shed light on the critical role of perceived influencer effort in these relationships. An empirical study using data from TikTok (Douyin) users and results indicate that sensory advertising experience positively affects user behavioral responses through the serial mediation of empathy and altruistic motive. Additionally, perceived influencer effort is found to be a crucial moderator of the effect of sensory advertising experience on user empathy, which further influences user behavioral responses. The findings provide insight into the persuasion effect and mechanism of short-form video influencer advertising and offer suggestions for advertising campaign designers.     

Unintended effects of incentivizing consumers to recommend a favorite brand

Marketers often use incentives such as coupons, rewards or special membership discounts in order to motivate consumers to purchase or recommend a particular brand. This practice is based on the underlying assumption that an increase in incentives will lead to an increase in consumer response – an idea which has been at the core of traditional economic thinking for decades. Some psychologists have claimed, however, that under specific conditions an increase in incentives can reduce (rather than increase) one's willingness to perform the behavior which is being incentivized. If materialized, the possibility that extrinsic incentives may diminish consumer willingness to recommend a favorite brand could have important theoretical and practical consequences in the context of word-of-mouth or buzz marketing. This study tests that possibility in the context of an experiment about Apple computers, a favorite brand among US college students. Participants were asked to recommend the brand to a friend (1) in absence of any monetary reward and (2) for a small monetary incentive. Students who were promised a small monetary reward experienced a decrease in intrinsic motivation and wrote shorter recommendations than those who were not promised any incentives. Data also suggest that the quality of the recommendation may decrease when incentives are offered. The results are discussed in line of their possible theoretical and practical significance.     

Lotus notes (groupware) in context

Reviewing Notes, or any groupware program, highlights the changing nature of software evaluation. Early reviews, for example, Press (1980), emphasized a program's features, efficiency (memory and storage requirements and speed), and user interface. These have all diminished in importance. With multiple revisions, the feature sets and efficiency of commercial programs for a given application have become relatively similar, and direct‐manipulation user interfaces like the Macintosh and Windows have reduced the differences among the user interfaces of programs.

Today, software (especially groupware) must be evaluated in context. It must be compatible with the skills and requirements of the users and the organization, and it must be well integrated with other software and systems. The stability, support, plans, business arrangements, and so on, of the vendor are also important. The program is the tip of an iceberg.

After describing Notes and its applications, I will discuss the question of its suitability in different organizations and integration with other software and vendors.     

非正交多址技术中利用对称矩阵的用户分组

现有非正交多址接入技术中，用户分组算法的实现首先对信道相似度门限值进行判断，选出候选成组用户；进而对候选成组用户的信道增益差进行比较，选出最优的成组用户。然而，上述分步求解算法中信道相似度门限值的设置存在一定的随机性，导致候选成组用户的选取不准确，从而影响分组结果，限制系统性能的提升。针对上述问题，提出利用对称矩阵的用户分组算法，对用户信道相似度进行非线性变换，而后将用户信道相似度和增益差线性求和构建成新的信道信息矩阵，进一步利用该矩阵的对称性进行求解。仿真分析表明该方法分组结果比设置门限的传统方法更优，在不同用户数目时系统容量均得到提升。在传统方法门限值为0.95时，所提算法系统容量在用户数为16时提升了13.4 Mb/s。     

Weiner,Richard. Professional's Guide to Publicity. New York: Richard Weiner,Inc., 1975

Abstract

An experiment involving 400 randomly selected professionals from the midwestern United States indicated that the response rate to a mail questionnaire was significantly increased by the use of an enclosed one dollar incentive. Promised incentives of two dollars and entry into a lottery with awards of fifty dollars, thirty dollars, and twenty dollars in return for a completed questionnaire did not significantly change the response rate to the mail questionnaire relative to the no incentive (control) group response rate. The two dollar promised incentive group had a higher response rate than the lottery-type promised incentive group with prizes of fifty, thirty, and twenty dollars.     

Platform quality factors influencing content providers’ loyalty

This study investigates what platform quality factors affect the contents of the loyalty of content providers to support the continued expansion and sustainability of online platforms. It analyses empirically the influence of platform quality on the satisfaction with and loyalty to the service as well as on the platform's ability to secure content providers from a survey of 222 platform users. It confirms five significant findings for platform quality and user loyalty. First, all five factors of SERVQUAL have meaningful effects on platform user satisfaction. Second, factors affecting service quality differ by gender. Third, while male users regard platform technology as most critical, female users are more concerned about platform events and interests. Fourth, female users care more about customer responses than male users do; however, the user interface is the most critical aspect for both genders. Finally, platform quality has a significant impact on satisfaction and loyalty among content providers. It identifies the importance of platform service quality as a factor to increase user (content providers) loyalty on the platform. And it also investigates differences according to user gender by subdividing platform service users and indicates how service quality effects can change according to user characteristics.     

Task type's effect on attitudes towards voice assistants

There is an emerging interest in examining user attitudes towards voice assistants (VAs); however, there is limited research on how user attitudes are formulated in different contexts. Drawing from the stereotype content models, the current study attempts to investigate how users perceive and evaluate voice assistants (VAs) in different contexts (i.e., functional vs. social tasks) based on warmth, competence and trustworthiness. Study 1 (N = 123) employs a within-subjects design to examine how task type (functional vs. social) affects user perceptions and attitudes towards a VA (i.e., Google Assistant). Study 2 (N = 116) and Study 3 (N = 61) examine the boundary effect of perceived psychological power and ease of use. The findings show that attitude is significantly more positive in functional tasks (vs. social), and this effect is mediated by perceived competence. This indirect effect is also significantly moderated by perceived ease of use. Perceived warmth does not mediate the effect of social tasks on attitude, and trust in VAs is a direct outcome of functional tasks. Taken together, this study contributes to both theory and practice in many ways. Specifically, the findings are the first to demonstrate a direct effect of task type on consumer perceptions and attitudes. Additionally, the findings indicate that user evaluations of VAs are still dominated by user perceptions of the competence of the VAs.     

Internet user behaviour in France and Britain: exploring socio‐spatial disparity among adolescents

The Internet has radically transformed society – although its diffusion has been uneven. Various studies of digital inequality have been undertaken in Anglo‐Saxon communities. Few studies have investigated digital inequality from a socio‐spatial perspective (urban vs. suburban, rather than urban vs. rural) in a French setting. This absence underscores a gap in knowledge and methodology. It highlights the complexities of gathering comparable data on Internet user behaviour beyond national borders. This paper takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigate emerging trends in Internet use across different territories (inner‐city and suburban, as opposed to urban vs. rural) by means of in‐depth interviews with Internet users aged 13–15 years old in France and Britain. The aim is to provide a broad understanding of the way in which teenage Internet users behave online in different territories. The investigation reveals a number of converging trends that are common to both France and Britain and some unexpected disparity.