Today we identify service articles published in Marketing, Management, Operations, Productions, Information Systems & Practioner-oriented Journals in December 2016.
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Heese, J., R. Krishnan and F. Moers (2016): Selective Regulator Decoupling And Organizations’ Strategic Responses, Academy of Management Journal, 59(6), pp. 2178-2204
Organizations often respond to institutional pressures by symbolically adopting policies and procedures but decoupling them from actual practice. Literature has examined why organizations decouple from regulatory pressures. In this study, we argue that decoupling occurs within regulatory agencies and results from a combination of conflicting institutional pressures, complex goals, and internal fragmentation. Further, regulatory decoupling is selective–that is, regulators fail to adequately enforce standards only for one set of organizations. Regulated organizations that benefit from selective regulatory decoupling use nonmarket strategies to maintain their favorable regulatory status, and, in the process, selectively decouple their norms in one organizational activity but not others. As an empirical context, we use the hospital industry in which regulators have to balance conflicting pressures to be tough on fraud while maintaining the community’s access to essential but unprofitable services, such as charity care and medical education. In response, hospital regulators selectively decouple and exhibit leniency in enforcement of mispricing practices toward “beneficent hospitals,” defined as hospitals that provide more charity care and medical education. In turn, beneficent hospitals selectively decouple their service and profit goals by providing unprofitable services to uninsured patients, while mispricing insured patients to earn higher reimbursements.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.5465/amj.2015.0446 [Google]
Barrett, M., E. Oborn and W. Orlikowski (2016): Creating Value in Online Communities: The Sociomaterial Configuring of Strategy, Platform, and Stakeholder Engagement, Information Systems Research, 27(4), pp. 704-723
How is value created in an online community (OC) over time? We explored this question through a longitudinal field study of an OC in the healthcare arena. We found that multiple kinds of value were produced and changed over time as different participants engaged with the OC and its evolving technology in various ways. To explain our findings, we theorize OC value as performed through the ongoing sociomaterial configuring of strategies, digital platforms, and stakeholder engagement. We develop a process perspective to explain these dynamics and identify multiple different kinds of value being created by an OC over time: financial, epistemic, ethical, service, reputational, and platform. Our research points to the importance of expanding the notion of OC users to encompass a broader understanding of stakeholders. It further suggests that creating OC value increasingly requires going beyond a dyadic relationship between the OC and the firm to encompassing a more complex relationship involving a wider ecosystem of stakeholders.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1287/isre.2016.0648 [Google]
Schepers, J. J. L., E. J. Nijssen and G. A. H. van der Heijden (2016): Innovation in the frontline: Exploring the relationship between role conflict, ideas for improvement, and employee service performance, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 33(4), pp. 797-817
Although practitioners and scholars recognize that frontline employees’ (FLEs’) performance may improve rather than suffer from role conflict, research has yet to show how firms can manage this complex process. This study proposes that employees’ ideas for improvement are a crucial mediator in role conflict’s positive influence on FLEs’ service performance. A conditional process model was tested in two empirical studies with multisource data. Results show that role conflict positively influences service performance through the employee’s ideas for improvement. Role conflict also has a direct negative effect on performance. Detailed moderating analyses, using a floodlight approach, show that role conflict’s total effect on service performance is positive only when an employee’s learning orientation and the manager’s level of encouragement for improvement are aligned. In other cases role conflict does not affect, or can even seriously impair FLEs’ service performance. This study is the first to demonstrate empirically how, and under what conditions, role conflict can lead to performance enhancement of FLEs. Our findings help marketing managers to leverage role conflict for service innovation and to serve customers better.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2016.01.004 [Google]
Edelman, B. and Z. Lai (2016): Design of Search Engine Services: Channel Interdependence in Search Engine Results, Journal of Marketing Research, 53(6), pp. 881-900
The authors examine prominent placement of search engines’ own services and effects on users’ choices. Evaluating a natural experiment in which different results were shown to users who performed similar searches, they find that Google’s prominent placement of its Flight Search service increased the clicks on paid advertising listings by more than half while decreasing the clicks on organic search listings by about the same quantity. This effect appears to result from interactions between the design of search results and users’ decisions about where and how to focus their attention: users who decide what to click on the basis of relevance were more likely to select paid listings, whereas users who are influenced by visual presentation and page position were more likely to click on Google’s own Flight Search listing. The authors consider implications of these findings for competition policy and for online marketing strategies
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ [Google]
Blut, M. (2016): E-Service Quality: Development of a Hierarchical Model, Journal of Retailing, 92(4), pp. 500-517
Using survey data from 358 online customers, the study finds that the e-service quality construct conforms to the structure of a third-order factor model that links online service quality perceptions to distinct and actionable dimensions, including (1) website design, (2) fulfillment, (3) customer service, and (4) security/privacy. Each dimension is found to consist of several attributes that define the basis of e-service quality perceptions. A comprehensive specification of the construct, which includes attributes not covered in existing scales, is developed. The study contrasts a formative model consisting of four dimensions and sixteen attributes against a reflective conceptualization. The results of this comparison indicate that studies using an incorrectly specified model overestimate the importance of certain e-service quality attributes. Global fit criteria are also found to support the detection of measurement misspecification. Meta-analytic data from 31,264 online customers are used to show that the developed measurement predicts customer behavior better than widely used scales, such as WebQual and E-S-Qual. The results show that the new measurement enables managers to assess e-service quality more accurately and predict customer behavior more reliably.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.jretai.2016.09.002 [Google]
Obeng, E., R. Luchs, J. J. Inman and J. Hulland (2016): Survival of The Fittest: How Competitive Service Overlap and Retail Format Impact Incumbents’ Vulnerability to New Entrants, Journal of Retailing, 92(4), pp. 383-396
Many retailers invest in ancillary services to provide shoppers with additional reasons to come to their stores. However, it is unclear whether these services insulate incumbents from new entrants. We address this question by examining how the size and uniqueness of an incumbent’s service portfolio protects its sales after a new competitor enters. We study uniqueness by introducing the notion of “competitive service overlap” (CSO) that operationalizes service similarity, and show both that retailers are best served by offering many services and that particularly successful retailers have more unique service portfolios. Furthermore, the impact of uniqueness is most prominent when a grocery incumbent faces a discounter entrant (e.g., Kroger facing a Wal-Mart entry).
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.jretai.2016.07.001 [Google]
Cui, S. and S. Veeraraghavan (2016): Blind Queues: The Impact of Consumer Beliefs on Revenues and Congestion, Management Science, 62(12), pp. 3656-3672
In many service settings, customers have to join the queue without being fully aware of the parameters of the service provider (e.g., customers at checkout counters may not know the true service rate before joining). In such ‘blind queues,’ customers make their joining/balking decisions based on limited information about the service provider’s operational parameters (from past service experiences, reviews, etc.) and queue lengths. We analyze a firm serving customers making decisions under arbitrary beliefs about the service parameters in an observable queue for a service with a known price. By proposing an ordering for the balking threshold distributions in the customer population, we are able to compare the effects of customer beliefs on the queue. We show that, although revealing the service information to customers improves revenues under certain conditions, it may destroy consumer welfare or social welfare. Given a market size, consumer welfare can be significantly reduced when a fast server announces its true service parameter. When revenue is higher under some beliefs, one would expect the congestion to also be higher because more customers join, but we show that congestion may not necessarily increase. This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, stochastic models and simulation
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2320 [Google]
Xu, Y., C. Shi and I. Duenyas (2016): Priority Rules for Multi-Task Due-Date Scheduling under Varying Processing Costs, Production & Operations Management, 25(12), pp. 2086-2102
We study the scheduling of multiple tasks under varying processing costs and derive a priority rule for optimal scheduling policies. Each task has a due date, and a non-completion penalty cost is incurred if the task is not completely processed before its due date. We assume that the task arrival process is stochastic and the processing rate is capacitated. Our work is motivated by both traditional and emerging application domains, such as construction industry and freelance consulting industry. We establish the optimality of Shorter Slack time and Longer remaining Processing time (SSLP) principle that determines the priority among active tasks. Based on the derived structural properties, we also propose an effective cost-balancing heuristic policy and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed policy through extensive numerical experiments. We believe our results provide operators/managers valuable insights on how to devise effective service scheduling policies under varying costs.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/poms.12606 [Google]
Bigné, E., E.-M. Caplliure and M.-J. Miquel (2016): eWOM on Travel Agency Selection: Specialized versus Private Label, Psychology & Marketing, 33(12), pp. 1046-1053
In the travel industry, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) elicits a major influence on consumers’ decision making. Travel retailers are facing the new challenges derived from the different nature of their competitors-big hypermarkets, for instance, are extending their brands to travel services-and the challenges derived from online comments that consumers have access to. With a sample of 263 tourists, and using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis data analysis, this paper shows how the selection between a specialized travel agency and a private label (PL) agency is influenced by five factors: the usefulness attached to online reviews by users and the valence of those online reviews, attitude and experience with PL, and the individual’s value consciousness. The contribution of this paper not only comes from the novelty of considering PL in the context of travel agencies, but also from using a relatively novel data analysis approach useful for analyzing management issues
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1002/mar.20938 [Google]
Buzova, D., S. Sanz-Blas and A. Cervera-Taulet (2016): Cross-cultural Perceptions of Onshore Guided Tours: A Qualitative Approach Based on eWOM, Psychology & Marketing, 33(12), pp. 1054-1061
Recognizing the importance of the study of guided tour experiences and being aware of the cross-cultural variations of services’ perceptions, the purpose of this article is to examine if cruise tourists from the two main generating markets (Europe and North America) perceive differently a port of call guided tour based on the content of the eWOM generated. The data set was comprised of 334 reviews on guided tours undertaken in Spanish ports of call and published during the period 2009-2015 on the major travel Web site Tripadvisor. The thematic content analysis of the data was performed using the text mining software Leximancer. The results yielded different pictures for the experiences described by both cultures, with Europeans valuing the tour in terms of efficiency and North Americans praising guide’s performance and tailor-made tour services. Based on these findings, practical implications are discussed
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1002/mar.20939 [Google]
Sánchez-Franco, M. J., A. Navarro-García and F. J. Rondán-Cataluña (2016): Online Customer Service Reviews in Urban Hotels: A Data Mining Approach, Psychology & Marketing, 33(12), pp. 1174-1186
This study proposes a product feature-oriented approach to the analysis of online guests’ reviews, and it analyzes the relationship between the most salient features and guests’ hotel rating in the online travel agencies environment. In particular, this research means to address the following research question: How can this understanding of these features help us to design desirable urban hotel experiences that guests really assess? This research employs a sample of 829 Spanish urban hotels and 19,318 reviews. These data, by extracting attributes that are mentioned differently by males or females, reveal the moderating role of gender on the influence of the main dimensions of hospitality services on hotel ratings.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1002/mar.20955 [Google]
