Exploring the forms of dysfunctional customer behaviour: A study of differences in servicescape and customer disaffection with service

Abstract

Although wide agreement exists between scholars and marketing practitioners concerning the prevalence of dysfunctional customer behaviour, to date empirical research into this phenomenon is lacking. This article aims to identify empirically grounded categories of dysfunctional customer behaviours and examine the extent to which customers' perceptions of physical servicescape environments, social facets of servicescape, and customer disaffection with service differ for each category. Based on a quantitative sample of 380 consumer perpetrators, cluster analysis reveals three clusters of dysfunctional customer behaviour forms labelled ‘petty norm infringements’, ‘felonious norm infringements’, and ‘belligerent norm infringements’. Subsequent variance analysis assesses the perceived differences between perceived physical servicescape, social servicescape, and customer disaffection for each identified form cluster. Specifically, the study findings reveal statistically significant differences between the forms of dysfunctional customer behaviour that are perpetrated across different service environments. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the study for theorists and practitioners.     

Spatial and Racial Patterning of Real Estate Broker Listings in New York City

It has been well documented that Black homeseekers face discrimination in the housing market in the form of racial steering and other institutional policies and practices that are critical in limiting housing access. Less is known about the mechanisms that operate on the other side of real estate transactions to perpetuate racially segregated neighborhoods. We investigated whether White and Black brokers face segregation in the housing market. That is, to what extent do White and Black brokers differentially market property listings in neighborhoods of varying racial composition? Using real estate listings extracted from the websites of two of the largest New York City real estate brokerages, we examined whether Black and White brokers market properties primarily in Black and White neighborhoods, respectively; and whether, controlling for gender and experience level, Black brokers had a lower average price per square foot than White brokers. Results showed that Black brokers overwhelmingly marketed properties in Black neighborhoods, with fewer listings in White areas. Black brokers also marketed properties with an average price per square foot that was $197 lower than White brokers. Black brokers who worked in offices in Black neighborhoods had the lowest asking price of all brokers. Taken together, Black and White real estate brokers control a bifurcated market in NYC, perpetuating residential segregation and Black–White income and wealth disparities.     

Service sabotage: The dark side of service dynamics

While many aspects of services research assume that employees are largely compliant to management prescribed service standards, a number of recent studies have highlighted the deliberate sabotage by service workers as a key issue. We contend that service sabotage is important not simply because of the pervasiveness of such behaviors, but also because of the impact that such acts can have on firm growth and profitability. Consequently, we seek to achieve three inter-linked objectives in this article. First, we highlight how service saboteurs harm customers’ service experiences and negatively affect the performance of the firm. Second, in order to assist managers in recognizing these behaviors, we identify the most common types of service saboteurs and forms of sabotage. Specifically, we classify and describe four main types of service saboteurs: Thrill Seekers, Apathetics, Customer Revengers, and Money Grabbers. Finally, and most importantly, we provide a series of suggestions regarding how managers might effectively address service sabotage in their firms. These include gathering information and exploiting existing data to establish the extent and nature of sabotage, recruiting the right quality of service staff, training and rewarding employees, enriching and empowering employees, developing a service culture, and initiating better monitoring systems and procedures.     

Engineering Formality: Flyover and Skywalk Construction in Mumbai

This article investigates the engineering of elevated transport infrastructure in contemporary Mumbai. It argues that the conception, construction and implementation of flyovers and skywalks in Mumbai over the past 20 years has been part of elite efforts seeking to instil a more free‐flowing, predictable and regulated city. The techniques, routines, standards and visualizations comprising these engineering schemes have promised ways of reshaping the socio‐material configurations and everyday landscapes of Mumbai into a more knowable, functional and integrated realm. The article suggests that this can be understood analytically as a means of trying to establish and maintain ‘formal’ ideals, citizens and spaces in Mumbai against wider urban contexts perceived as increasingly ‘informal’. The article thus emphasizes the importance of exploring how the ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ are actively produced and imagined against each other through material practices and procedures, and the central role of urban engineering in attempts at reconfiguring the social and political dimensions of urban life.     

Risk and Return: A Revisit Using Expected Returns

This paper uses direct estimates of expected returns to examine the link between standard measures of financial risk and investor return requirements. The results show that systematic risk commands a significant positive risk premium, much larger than found using historical returns as proxies for expectations. Furthermore, there are nonlinearities in the relationship between risk and return. Finally, we show that expected returns and risk premiums in the equity markets change over time and that these changes are related to changes in interest rates on U.S. government obligations.     

Cost analysis of water utilities: A goodness-of-fit approach

The behavior of privately owned and publicly owned water utilities is examined by calculating the percentage difference between the observed cost and the optimum cost consistent with the Weak Axiom of Cost Minimization for each individual water utility. It allows for a comprehensive analysis of nearly optimizing behavior of economic units as opposed to the conventional analysis of exact optimizing behavior. The empirical results provide evidence that private water utilities are more efficient than public water utilities.     

Preserving preference rankings under background risk

For any random vector of wealth payoffs , let the random variable be mutually independent of and with . The basic question we address in this paper is the following: When can we say that is preferred by an expected-utility maximizer to whenever is preferred to ? In other words, when can we guarantee that the addition of an arbitrary independent background noise will not affect the preference ranking between other risks?     

Some Fiscal Implications of Monetary Policy

We study the implications of alternative monetary targeting procedures for real interest rates and economic activity. We find that countercyclical monetary policy rules lead to higher real interest rates, higher average tax rates, lower output but lower variability of tax rates and consumption relative to procyclical rules. For a country with a high level of public debt (e.g. Italy), the adoption of a countercyclical procedure such as interest rate pegging may conceivably raise public debt servicing costs by more than half a percentage point of GNP. Our analysis suggests that the current debate on the targeting procedures of the European Central Bank ought to be broadened to include a discussion of the fiscal implications of monetary policy.     

Methodology in International acquisitions: An exploratory study

There has been relatively little empirical research into international acquisition methodology; this article examines several strategy and methodology issues through an exploratory approach based mainly on seven detailed case studies of UK-based companies. The research suggests, inter alia, that there has been greater concentration not only in terms of product categories but also in geographic markets, that the companies had well-established acquisition and country screening criteria and that for important acquisitions there is concern to achieve a detailed ‘strategic fit’. The article concludes by making tentative recommendations for company management regarding acquisition analysis.     

Forecasting the extent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

This paper has a dual objective: (1) to describe the current status of the structure of a newly developed model system to generate a wide span of U.S. HIV/AIDS estimates; and (2) to implement that system through the development of a dataset of HIV/AIDS incidence and prevalence, by stage, in the U.S. for a range of past and future years. There are many uncertainties regarding the anticipated effects of HIV/AIDS; examination of many of these effects indicates multiple societal difficulties. The characteristic of AIDS-growth is that of a long-delayed but inexorable disabling morbidity "taking off" in 1991-1992 from an HIV population widely thought to be 1.0-1.5 million spread throughout the Nation. Although widely dispersed, its impact, even at this early stage of growth, is to endanger the health and social support systems of our urban centers. The spread of AIDS cases into the smaller cities and rural counties indicates that those problems will not be limited to our major cities. This paper provides new and purposely pessimistic estimates of the levels of prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS for future years, based on U.S. AIDS cases reported. Although these numbers are essentially upper bounds, their values are consistent with the upper sides of some recent broad band projections released in early Summer 1989 by the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO). However, our estimation has generated data within a more proscribed range. A first set of forecasts has been provided to the State of Virginia's Department of Health for their use in statewide resource planning. The United States and the world face a severe HIV pandemic in the coming decade. The certainty of the threat is acknowledged by all of the major private and public medical authorities and institutions. Yet, to date, no official projection of the emergence, the level, and the sweep of the epidemic has been accepted by the medical community. And, there is certainly little agreement on the impact on the delivery of health care services in the United States and Canada, as well as throughout the world. On 26 June 1989, the U.S. GAO released a report that concluded, in part, that the Federal government's official data [e.g. from the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) of 12 May 1989] were greatly understating the epidemic's extent. Specifically, the CDC's estimate of 185,000-320,000 (cumulative) cases of AIDS expected to be reported by the end of 1991 contrasted with GAO's estimate of 300,000-480,000.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)