This paper proposes a multi-year membership pricing policy for a service business like a gym chain. In the pricing policy, the equivalent membership price per year is relatively low to attract customers, and the multi-year membership fees must be prepaid in full. The prepaid cash provides resources for scale-expansion by opening new stores. We develop a nonlinear mixed integer programming model to formulate the pricing decisions. Numerical experiments reveal that the multi-year membership pricing policy, from a long-term perspective, is substantially better than the business-as-usual pricing policy (1-year membership) in cash balance, profit, and market share. Yet, the performances of the two pricing policies do not differ much from a short-term perspective. These findings indicate that the multi-year pricing policy may be a good strategy, because it initially attracts less attention of competitors; suddenly it emerges and substantially outperforms its competitors in cash balance, profit, and market share. 相似文献
Despite the importance of retaining customers in the context of e-shopping, the formation of an e-buyer’s loyalty remains inconclusive. Drawing on e-shopping literature, this study developed and tested a model to explain e-buyer loyalty from the perspective of business-to-consumer relationship management. We build on a dedication-constraint dual model to delineate the relationship between perceived benefits, switching cost, service-specific investment, and loyalty. Empirical results from 505 respondents show that loyalty is influenced by both perceived benefits and switching costs. In addition, switching costs partially mediate the relationship between service-specific investments and loyalty. Implications of these results are discussed. 相似文献
We investigate the impacts of job position and survey time period on employee’s organizational commitment of insurance company after the merger. Our results show that both job position and survey time period are significant determinants to employee’s organizational commitment. Results also show that there is no interaction effect between survey time period and job position. For each year, during the survey time period, the mean of organization commitment of agent employees is significantly higher than staff employees. The mean difference of organizational commitment between agent and staff employees shrank year by year during the survey time period. 相似文献
The city of Kaohsiung has been urgently reducing its rates of ownership and usage of privately owned motor vehicles. The most important strategy undertaken thus far has been to build mass rapid transit systems. This study aims to apply the Involvement Theory to construct an inventory to measure level of travelers’ involvement in public transport services. The results indicate that the number of low involvement travelers is the critical factor that determines whether the new public transport system can effectively operate. They also provide authorities with precise marketing strategies targeting different groups in order to allow the new public transport systems to sufficiently meet public needs. 相似文献
Using a sample of German firms, we investigate the financial statement effects of adopting International Accounting Standards
(IAS) during 1998 through 2002. We find that total assets and book value of equity, as well as variability of book value and
income, are significantly higher under IAS than under German GAAP (HGB). In addition, book value and income are no more value
relevant under IAS than under HGB, and HGB (IAS) income is highly persistent (transitory). Finally, we find weak evidence
that IAS income exhibits greater conditional conservatism than HGB income. Our results are consistent with the fair-value
(income smoothing) orientation of IAS (HGB).
This paper studies the investment decision by a monopolistic internet service provider (ISP) in different regulatory environments. We consider that the ISP can technically provide separate quality upgrades to two vertically differentiated content providers (CPs). Our results show that if unregulated, the ISP could optimally provide asymmetric quality upgrades to both CPs, in favor of the high-quality CP. This subsequently increases the degree of content differentiation, softening competition between the CPs. Imposing a nondiscrimination regulation that forces the ISP to provide an equal quality upgrade to both CPs, however, reduce the ISP’s investment incentive and social welfare. Furthermore, the social planner provides preferential treatment to the high-quality CP if the degree of substitutability is sufficiently low. In contrast, it is socially optimal to prioritize the low-quality CP if the contents are sufficient substitutes, or provide exclusivity if vertical differentiation is high.
Prior studies document that the book-to-market (BM) effect is absent in the Taiwan stock market. Using Taiwanese data covering from 1991 to 2006, we show that, after controlling for the size effect and the Fama and French's (1993) risk factors, the BM effect only exists for those firms with low R&D intensity essentially because these stocks suffer less from investors’ underreaction to R&D investment. The BM effect arises primarily from fundamental reversals acting as a proxy for investors’ overreaction. 相似文献