Effects of loyalty programs on value perception,program loyalty,and brand loyalty

The authors investigate how reward schemes of a loyalty program influence perceived value of the program and how value perception of the loyalty program affects customer loyalty. The results show that involvement moderates the effects of loyalty programs on customer loyalty. In high-involvement situations, direct rewards are preferable to indirect rewards. In low-involvement situations, immediate rewards are more effective in building a program's value than delayed rewards. Under high-involvement conditions, value perception of the loyalty program influences brand loyalty both directly and indirectly through program loyalty. Under low-involvement conditions, there is no direct effect of value perception on brand loyalty. Youjae Yi (uoujae@snu.ac.kr) (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1987) is a professor of marketing in the College of Business Administration at Seoul National University. He was at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor, Sanford Robertson Assistant Professor, and tenured associate professor. His work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Applied Psychology, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Consumer Psychology, theJournal of Advertising, and theJournal of Econometrics. He is currently an editor of theKorean Journal of Consumer Studies and was an editor of theSeoul Journal of Business. Hoseong Jeon (jeonho1@snu.ac.kr) is a doctoral candidate in the College of Business Administration at Seoul National University. He received his M.A. in advertising from Michigan Sate University. His current research interests include customer relationship management, advertising effects on consumer attitudes, and determinants of customer loyalty.     

Linking Website Interactivity to Consumer Behavioral Intention in an Online Travel Community: The Mediating Role of Utilitarian Value and Online Trust

Although prior studies have shown that perceived website interactivity plays an important role in positive behavioral intentions of online customers, the underlying psychological mechanisms remain unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the mediating role of utilitarian value and online trust in relationship between perceived website interactivity and repurchase intention in an online travel community. Data were collected from 227 customers who had purchased travel-related products on any online travel website within the past 12 months. The empirical results supported all study hypotheses. As predicted, utilitarian value and online trust fully mediate the relationship between perceived website interactivity and repurchase intention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Herding by foreign investors and emerging market equity returns: Evidence from Korea

This paper studies the effect of herding by foreign investors on stock returns in the Korean market. We conduct both pre and post-liberalization analyses and utilize a three-stage least squares analysis in order to control for the simultaneous relationship. We find evidence of a significant impact of foreign investor herding on stock returns in addition to intra-year positive feedback trading by foreign investors. However, changes in domestic institutional ownership do not have any significant effect on stock returns. In addition, foreign investors tend to buy/sell shares that domestic institutions sell/buy in the herding year.     

Spurious regressions with stationary series

A spurious regression occurs when a pair of independent series, but with strong temporal properties, are found apparently to be related according to standard inference in an OLS regression. Although this is well known to occur with pairs of independent unit root processes, this paper finds evidence that similar results are found with positively autocorrelated autoregressive series or long moving averages. This occurs regardless of the sample size and for various distributions of the error terms.     

The role of environmental factors in growth accounting

This paper explores a relatively new methodology, the directional distance function method, to analyse productivity growth. The method allows us to explicitly evaluate the role that undesirable outputs of the economy, such as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, have on the frontier production process which we specify as a piecewise linear and convex boundary function. We decompose productivity growth into efficiency change (catching up) and technology change (innovation). We test the statistical significance of the estimates using recently developed bootstrap methods. We also explore implications for growth of total factor productivity in the OECD and Asian economies. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ASP effects in the small-sized enterprise: the case of the Bizmeka service from Korea Telecom

An application service provider (ASP) is a business model providing information technology (IT)-enabled solutions to customers over the Internet. Utilizing an ASP model, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can acquire affordable IT solutions. Korea Telecom (KT), a leading IT company in Korea, provides an ASP service called Bizmeka to SMEs. In this study, we identify factors influencing the perceived benefits of Bizmeka usage. We also examine the relationship between the perceived benefits of Bizmeka usage and customer satisfaction. Based on the results of our survey, we found the following factors to be important in determining customer satisfaction with ASPs: cost and time impact, maintenance impact, and security risks.     

Social exchange approach,job satisfaction,and turnover intention in the airline industry

Service Business - This paper investigates the effects of social exchange relationships on job satisfaction and turnover intention in the airline industry. To this end, two constructs of social...     

The impact of tour quality and tourist satisfaction on tourist loyalty: The case of Chinese tourists in Korea

This study examines the causal relationship between tourist expectations, tourist motivations, tour quality, tourist satisfaction, tourist complaints and tourist loyalty of Chinese tourists in the Republic of Korea using path analysis. It was found that tourist expectations have a negative effect on the perceived experiential quality of the tour, yet tourist motivation has a positive effect on the perceived tour quality. In turn, the perceived tour quality has a positive effect on tourist satisfaction. Similarly there is an inverse relationship between satisfaction and tourist complaints, and a positive relationship exists between satisfaction and loyalty. Equally, the higher is the number of complaints, the lower are the loyalty levels. These results will provide potential guidelines for inbound tour agents who plan to attract Chinese tourists to Korea and enable them to formulate appropriate strategies. This study also seeks to contribute to conceptual and policy formation by understanding the determinants of tourist satisfaction and loyalty.     

Combining Revealed Preference Data with Stated Preference Data: A Latent Class Approach

A substantial literature exists combining data from revealed preference (RP) and stated preference (SP) sources, aimed either at testing for the convergent validity of the two approaches used in nonmarket valuation or as a means of drawing on their relative strengths to improve the ultimate estimates of value. In doing so, it is assumed that convergence of the two elicitation approaches is an “all or nothing” proposition; i.e., the RP and SP data are either consistent with each other or they are not. The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative framework that allows for possible divergence among individuals in terms the consistency between their RP and SP responses. In particular, we suggest the use of a latent class approach to segment the population into two groups. The first group has RP and SP responses that are internally consistent, while the remaining group exhibits some form of inconsistent preferences. An EM algorithm is employed in an empirical application that draws on the Alberta and Saskatchewan moose hunting data sets used in earlier combined RP and SP exercises. The empirical results suggest that somewhere between one-third and one-half the sample exhibits consistent preferences. We also examine differences in welfare estimates drawn from the two classes.     

A computational framework for analyzing dynamic auctions: The market impact of information sharing

This article develops a computational framework to analyze dynamic auctions and uses it to investigate the impact of information sharing among bidders. We show that allowing for the dynamics implicit in many auction environments enables the emergence of equilibrium states that can only be reached when firms are responding to dynamic incentives. The impact of information sharing depends on the extent of dynamics and provides support for the claim that information sharing, even of strategically important data, need not be welfare reducing. Our methodological contribution is to show how to adapt the experience-based equilibrium concept to a dynamic auction environment and to provide an implementable boundary-consistency condition that mitigates the extent of multiple equilibria.