Measuring service experience: a utility-based heuristic model

This research aims to construct a model to evaluate service experience. We develop a novel model for service experience by incorporating positive and negative dimensions. We demonstrate that greater utility from experience results in greater value of service experience. We also discovered negative dimensions are the key reason; especially waiting time. We separated five groups to help firms explore deeper insights from various dimensions. The value of service experience in group of middle range has the greater contrast between positive and negative dimensions than the other groups. Service providers can obtain customer perception to adjust or revise the service components.     

How online service recovery approaches bolster recovery performance? A multi-level perspective

Employees are often sandwiched between understandable customer grievances and unchangeable organizational policies: only when employees feel fairly treated will they treat customers fairly. Most previous studies focused on external service recovery systems for customers, but neglected internal service recovery systems for frontline employees. By extending Homburg and Fürst’s research, this study adopts a multi-level perspective to explore the influences of the mechanistic approach (process guidelines, behaviour guidelines, and compensation guidelines) and the organic approach of service recovery (empowerment and recovery culture) on frontline employees’ responses (recovery efficacy, accountability, and performance) towards implementing a service recovery within an online auction context.     

Do online discounts and free gifts damage brand image of service? The moderating role of promotion-proneness

The present paper outlines a study based on an experimental design that investigated the effect of online price discounts and free gifts on consumers’ evaluation of the brand, in the context of an airline. The study also analyzed whether promotion-proneness exercises a moderating effect on this relationship. It was found that discounts generate a more positive brand image than free gifts among promotion-prone users, while for less promotion-prone individuals, the opposite is true. The results will help managers to select the most appropriate online sales promotion type for reaching different consumer groups, depending on their promotion-proneness, in line with the needs and objectives of the service firm.     

The effect of latency variables on repeated measures inference applied to the measurement of risk-taking as a function of psychopathy

In numerous psychology studies, subjects are asked to perform some task a number of times, T. The effect of the choice of T on the associated inference, however, is usually not assessed. We investigate the appropriate choice of T empirically by using data collected in a study on the relationship between psychopathy and risk-taking in 90 inner city drug users enrolled in a residential treatment program. We show that, when studying this relationship, the latency variable usually discarded from the analysis behaves exponentially allowing a natural division of the study period 1, . . . , T into two distinct subperiods. These subperiods yield significantly different results—in the early period only (which we call “reactive”), subjects with high psychopathy scores exhibit lower sensitivity to reward and punishment in our risk taking experiment. The later period (which we call “stable”) shows no relationship between sensitivity to reward and punishment and psychopathic tendencies.     

Brazilian retail banking and the 2008 financial crisis: Were the government-controlled banks that important?

We revisit the interest rate pass-through effect using weekly retail banking data from May 2006 to March 2010. Our choice of data avoids caveats of previous studies concerning excessive data aggregation and the estimation of how fast changes in benchmark interest rates impact those charged on short-term loans in Brazil. Our analysis focuses on four large retail banks – two of them privately owned and run, two of them government-controlled – before and after September 2008. They account for 60% of the total credit supplied by retail banks. Results indicate that government control over two of the largest banks, supposedly an asset for crisis management, may have had higher welfare costs than assumed. We find no evidence of asymmetry in adjustments of retail rates charged by private and government-controlled banks.     

Discussion of “The impact of product market competition on the quantity and quality of voluntary disclosures”

Li (2010, this issue) examines how product market competition affects voluntary disclosure by firms. Using several competition proxies, she finds that both the competitive threat from potential entrants into an industry and from existing rivals affect the quantity and accuracy of voluntary profit and investment forecasts by firms in that industry. However, the study’s findings are inconclusive mainly because each competition proxy used can reflect both types of competitive threat. The focus of my discussion is to provide some comments and suggestions for future researchers to consider in examining how the nature of product market competition affects voluntary firm disclosure.     

The two-fund separation theorem revisited

This paper resolves two issues regarding the traditional capital asset pricing model with one risk-free asset which seem to have been overlooked in the literature. First, it provides an elementary and complete proof of the two-fund separation theorem which accounts for the fact that asset demand may become undefined if the limiting slopes of the investor’s indifference curves are finite. Second, it shows that an additional limiting condition on investors’ risk aversions is generally necessary to guarantee existence of an equilibrium. Moreover, a generalized existence result is formulated which includes investors who in equilibrium may not invest in risky assets and a simple condition ensuring positive equilibrium asset prices is given.