Experts and Amateurs: The Role of Experience in Internet Auctions

The use of auctions as a pricing mechanism has grown dramatically over the last few years. The introduction of electronic auctions has significantly widened the pool of consumers who participate in auctions and increased the number of companies attempting to sell their products in an auction format. Previous empirical research on auctions has focused almost exclusively on the behavior of professional bidders in high stakes common value auctions or the behavior of students in laboratory experiments. We collect data on a large number of electronic auctions, across four product categories, to explore the behavior of consumers bidding in a real marketplace. In particular, we focus on the role experience plays in their bidding behavior to uncover whether consumer learning drives the bidding process towards outcomes described in the theoretical literature on auctions. We find that experience does indeed lead to behavior which is more consistent with theory although the proportion of experienced bidders who behave in a manner inconsistent with theory remains quite large.     

A pricing scheme for QoS in overlay networks based on first-price auctions and reimbursement

Providing Assured-Quality Services over data networks has been a key objective for the past few decades. Research and commercial activities have been focused on several aspects related to this main objective, such as implementing services over heterogeneous networks, providing scalable solutions and verifying network performance. However, less attention has been devoted to the interaction of these technical aspects with the business plane. Although several quality-based pricing schemes have been proposed, reimbursement proposals, while quite common in other scenarios as health, hotel reservation or airlines, are still rare in the field of Internet Economics. In this work, we propose a simple pricing scheme and study it in detail, in order to use Quality of Service monitoring information as feedback to the business plane, with the ultimate objective of improving the seller’s revenue. In our framework, Assured-Quality Services are sold through first-price auctions, and in case of failure, a percentage of the price paid for the service is given back to the buyers. We derive the expression for the willingness to pay and we model the reimbursement problem through a zero-sum Stackelberg game. We show that the Nash equilibrium of such game implies reimbursing 100 % in case of failures.     

The evolution of service innovation research: a critical review and synthesis

The number of service innovation articles has increased dramatically in the past 25 years. By reviewing 128 articles published between 1986 and 2010, primarily in leading marketing and innovation journals, this study analyzes the progression of service innovation research according to topicality and perspective. The authors summarize prior research by clustering it into three evolutional phases and drawing parallels with the evolution of the wider services marketing field. Overall, the view of service innovation has evolved, from a complement of traditional product innovation to a multidimensional, all-encompassing notion that entails several functions, both within and outside the firm.     

Focusing Service Management Efforts: A Model for Non profit Organizations

ABSTRACT

In recent years, many nonprofit organizations have experienced significant cut-backs in support from traditional sources while demand for their services has continued to increase. Many of these organizations have attempted to bridge this growing chasm by increasing their fund raising efforts. While not without value, these activities alone will not resolve the dilemma faced by many of these organizations. The authors present a 12-step model to assist managers in nonprofit organizations in determining how to reallocate scarce human and financial resources from non-crucial to truly critical service offerings and in so doing, better meet the needs of their critical constituencies.     

If the Supplier's Human Capital Walks Away,Where Would the Customer Go?

Purpose: Professional service firms' clients often develop stronger attachments to their key contact employee than to the service firm. Since professionals are highly mobile, buyers of professional business services constantly have to decide whether to follow their key contact employee or remain with their incumbent firm, while service firms face the threat of losing customers if the employee leaves. This study examines how the key contact employee's human capital, the social capital between the contact employee and the client, and the service company's structural capital affect the decision whether to follow the key contact employee to another professional service firm.

Methodology/approach: The model is tested on a sample of 120 organizational buyers of advertising services by using partial last squares, a structural equation modelling technique.

Findings: Professional service firms' investments in company-specific structural capital create a deterrent for clients to follow the contact employee, because remaining with the service firm will increase clients' return on the service providers' structural capital. Furthermore, higher levels of structural capital reduce the value of the contact employee's investments in human capital should the employee leave. Conversely, human capital creates motivation to follow the contact employee, while social capital only provides value in combination with human capital.

Research implications: This study employs concepts developed in economics and economic sociology rather than relationship marketing variables to examine attachments to individual professional service providers and to professional service firms.

Practical implications: The findings underline the importance of competence, both at the company and individual level, for retaining clients of professional services. These results contrast previous studies emphasizing close interpersonal relationships and service firms' relationship-building activities.

Originality/value/contribution: Human, social, and structural capital provide value to clients and therefore apply well to professional services. Hence, these variables provide alternative explanations to service firms' client retention or desertion than traditional relationship marketing variables do. The findings add to our understanding of service provider–client relationships in professional services and knowledge intensive firms.     

Towards an Improved Understanding of Industrial Services: Quality Dimensions and Their Impact on Buyer-Seller Relationships

ABSTRACT

The rapidly growing field of services marketing has had a strong focus on consumer services. This article deals with industrial services, i.e., services provided by a manufacturing company to organizational customers. The authors suggest a triangular model of industrial service quality involving a distinction between structural, process-related, and outcome-related aspects. These three quality dimensions are shown to have strong impacts on the customer's trust, satisfaction, and commitment. The authors discuss theoretical and managerial implications of their findings.     

Service value revisited: Specifying a higher-order, formative measure

Recent marketing literature pays particular attention to customer value because of the potential impact on customer behavior and, ultimately, firm performance. Whereas some studies conceptualize customer value in a unidimensional manner, more recent approaches take a multidimensional approach, generally conceptualizing value as composed of various benefits and sacrifices. However, nearly all of these studies consider value components in a reflective manner, which is not only problematic but in many cases conceptually incorrect. In addition, recent customer value research includes service components to define and operationalize the construct. This study suggests that customer value in service contexts, or service value, represents a higher-order, formative construct with benefit and sacrifice components. Specifically, the authors propose a formative model of service value with four components: service quality, service equity, confidence benefits, and perceived sacrifice. A multiple-industry study substantiates the contention that this higher-order, formative approach best models value. The results theoretically and empirically support the conceptualization of service value with formative components, and the measure is robust and works well across multiple service contexts.     

Governance mechanisms for mobile service innovation in value networks

Service innovation often requires multiple organizations to work together in complex, dynamic networks. Existing literature shows that mechanisms like trust, power and contracts govern activities in organizational networks. Scholars rarely study how such a mix of mechanisms evolves over time, especially not in relation to different stages of service innovation. This paper connects a phasing model on service innovation to concepts of inter-organizational governance in value networks, by examining what governance mechanisms are in use during service development, implementation and commercialization. This study analyzes an international survey among operators, content providers and application developers in the Mobile Internet services domain, which is noted for its complex inter-organizational networks. The findings suggest that power-based governance is in use in the early stages of developing service concepts and technologies, while trust-based governance is in use during implementation, roll-out and commercialization. Contract-based governance is most common during implementation and roll-out.     

Incorporating user costs in preference models for service alternatives

Services are often distinguished from goods by the involvement of the consumer in the production and delivery process. Since the net benefits derived by consumers depend upon their effectiveness and efficiency in fulfilling their required roles, preferences for and choice of alternative services should reflect their effort. We propose a model of preference which incorporatesuser costs, which reflect consumers' efforts, or a corresponding universal set ofuser service dimensions, which reflect attributes of the service that impinge on these user costs. We apply this model to a small-scale study of services for the transfer of written material. The findings demonstrate the ability to treat rigorously essential aspects of services, with implications for the management of services, and for further research.The authors acknowledge the considerable efforts of Rosemary Lyster, MBA student at New York University, and Lorraine Scudieri, Manager of Business Research at Bell Atlantic, in planning and executing a complex survey which provided the data used in this analysis. The authors were stimulated by discussions with Roger Betancourt, who deserves much of the credit and none of the blame for what follows. The authors are also grateful to Avijit Ghosh, Robert Shoemaker, and John Czepiel for their comments on an early version of this paper. Our application was motivated by a research project with Institut National des Telecommunications (France Telecom University) and, in particular with Pierre Vialle.     

An Empirical Analysis of Bidding Fees in Name-your-own-price Auctions

Interactive pricing mechanisms integrate customers into the price-setting process by letting them submit bids. Name-your-own-price auctions are such an interactive pricing mechanism, where buyers' bids denote the final price of a product or service in case they surpass a secret threshold price set by the seller. If buyers are given the flexibility to bid repeatedly, they might try to incrementally bid up to the threshold. In this case, charging fees for the option to place additional bids could generate extra revenue and reduce incremental bidding behavior. Based on an economic model of consumer bidding behavior in name-your-own-price auctions and two empirical studies, we analytically and empirically investigate the effects bidding fees have on buyers' bidding behavior. Moreover, we analyze the impact of bidding fees on seller revenue and profit based on our empirical results.     

Mergers in Sealed versus Oral Auctions

In this paper, we study mergers in oral or second-price auctions and compare them to mergers in sealed-bid or first-price auctions. We use an adaptation of the logit qualitative choice model to characterize the underlying bidder value distributions. In second-price auctions, this model has a closed-form relationship between winning bids (prices) and the probabilities of winning (shares), and this relationship gives rise to a Herfindahl-like formula that predicts merger effects. We compare mergers in second-price auctions to mergers in first-price auctions. Despite their differences, sealed-bid merger effects are predicted by the oral Herfindahl-like formula.The source of this curious similarity is not apparent.     

Toward a deeper understanding of service marketing: The past, the present, and the future

The authors investigate the intellectual pillars of service marketing and its evolution through key subareas during 1992-2009 using a citation-based approach. They derive insights for the most promising research directions. The results reveal the dynamic influences of different research topics on service marketing. In a graphical representation, the authors further show that the main topics have changed their research orientations over time. For example, the literature on online service & technology infusion reveals an increasingly operational and customer-focused orientation. A citation-based measure of the significance of research opportunities and a comparison with the topics found in recent literature reviews indicate that research on managing business-to-business services & service infusion, complaint handling & service recovery, and enhancing and managing the service value chain are promising topics. These results assist academics and practitioners by revealing what we know about service research and what we need to know in the future.     

An assessment of value creation in mobile service delivery and the moderating role of time consciousness

This study focuses on the perceived utilitarian value of a new service delivery mode, the mobile channel. The authors develop a framework that incorporates three mode-specific benefits - time convenience, user control, and service compatibility - as well as two costs - perceived risk and cognitive effort - as antecedents of perceived value. Because of the pervasiveness of time criticality as a value-added characteristic of the mobile channel, they also investigate the moderating influence of consumers’ time consciousness. They empirically investigate the model using mobile brokerage services as an illustrative application. The results reveal that the identified antecedents, with the exception of service compatibility, have a strong impact on mobile channel value perceptions, which in turn influence behavioral intentions. The authors also find that time consciousness moderates the aforementioned relationships.     

The Effectiveness of the Escrow Model: An Experimental Framework for Dynamic Online Environments

This article investigates the mechanism of an online escrow service (OES) in online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auctions. We develop a discrete-event driven simulation model for the dynamics of an OES adoption in electronic markets that involves four types of agents: the strategic trader, the moral trader, the OES provider, and the law-enforcement agent. By applying the Monte Carlo method in computer-based simulations, we demonstrate that the OES business model can effectively block fraud attempts and promote security in online C2C auction markets. However, our findings reveal that the prevailing OES fee rates are not necessarily set at the profit maximization level. Meanwhile, the simulation results show that the legal mechanisms in electronic markets directly impact the profit of escrow services.     

A Normative Model for Improving Services Quality

Abstract

As services businesses continue to proliferate, competition among professional and retail service providers rapidly intensifies. Amidst the competitive wars, service marketers are seeking new, innovative ways to improve services quality in order to maintain their competitive position. Many of the existing approaches are geared toward larger operations. This article proposes a normative model of services quality for service organizations of varying types and sizes with an emphasis on the small service provider. The utilization of this model can assist service providers in improving the quality of their service and overall customer satisfaction.     

An integrative model of customers' perceptions of health care services in Taiwan

As the health care service gets more competitive, health care practitioners and academic researchers are increasingly interested in exploring how patients perceive the quality and value of their care before building up their satisfaction levels and generating behavioural intentions. Drawing some theories from marketing and health care service literature, this study tries to propose an integrative model of customers' perceptions of health care services based on the established relationship among four key constructs (service quality, perceived value, satisfaction, and behavioural intentions). Structural equation modelling is then used to validate the model. As Taiwan's universal health insurance offers every citizen equal financial access to all health care providers, Taiwan offers a good opportunity to study how the patients' perception model is structured. The findings reveal both perceived quality and value as antecedent variables in this model illustrating direct and indirect paths from perceived quality and value to patient satisfaction and behavioural intentions.     

共享服务系统体验价值共创行为的影响因素

由于共享经济的发展和信息技术的进步,共享服务系统中的共创行为变得越来越容易实现,消费者与企业协作共创价值成为新的发展趋势。在消费者需求和共享行为都不断变化的情况下,如果共享服务供应商不清楚何种因素能够加速消费者价值共创行为的生成,则会影响共创价值实现。基于服务主导逻辑的理论,构建共享服务系统体验价值共创行为及其影响因素的理论模型。依据收集的450份有效问卷,对数据进行分析后发现,共享服务系统中感知利益、感知信任和社会可持续性通过互动协作(价值共创过程)对顾客体验价值产生影响,顾客体验价值对顾客的价值共创行为意向产生影响。研究结果表明,顾客参与共创动机中的效益动机和信任动机显著正向影响互动协作,互动协作显著正向影响体验价值和共创行为意向,而体验价值在互动协作和共创行为意向之间起到显著部分中介作用。共享服务提供方和产品制造方应多从顾客视角考虑其效益需求和信任需求,定位顾客需求和偏好,提供更有吸引力和说服力的商品与服务,使顾客感知到更多的收益,并形成较高信任度;提升与顾客的互动水平,建立顾客对服务方的好感,激发顾客更多的主动交互行为、参与行为和个人创新行为;重视资源的整合、分配和调动,实行以顾客驱动为核心的开放创新模式;招募优质用户,通过倾听和观察了解其价值主张,促进价值共创行为的生成,改善共享服务系统的整体服务质量。     

TMT社会网络、公司创业与企业绩效关系研究

拥有大量内外部信息资源的高管团队(TMT),其社会网络不但可以提供公司创业的机会来源,也是企业现在绩效和未来绩效的影响因素。TMT的社会网络只有通过公司创业机制才能转化为企业绩效的价值创造过程。中国背景下的实证研究显示:TMT社会网络、公司创业都与企业绩效正相关,对于企业而言,要高度重视通过管理手段激励整个高管团队的所有成员去构建有效的内外部社会网络;公司创业的价值增值中介作用也得到证实,公司创业发挥着重要的资源整合作用,有价值的TMT内外部社会网络只有充分融入企业的产品或服务创新,以及深层次的战略更新过程中,为企业的价值增值服务,才能转变为企业绩效。     

The Governance of Transactions by Commercial Intermediaries: An Analysis of the Re-engineering of Intermediation by Electronic Commerce

Efficiency arguments explain why commercial intermediaries exist and will continue to be involved in the exchanges despite the spread of digital networks. Commercial intermediaries provide producers and consumers with a set of information, logistic, securization and insurance (and liquidity) services. By bundling these services and by dedicating assets and learning capabilities to their production, commercial intermediaries allow transaction costs to be reduced. Digital networks per se cannot allow transacting parties to benefit from such efficient providers of intermediation services. Rather than establishing direct relationships among producers and consumers, the Internet will support a re-organization of existing intermediation chains, because traditional intermediaries will reinforce their ability to provide these service by using ITs. The analysis of the role of commercial intermediaries thus leads to a better understanding of the future of e-commerce. In turn, e-commerce provides New-Institutional Economics with a stimulating case study.