Services section has been mushrooming over the last decades and now dominates economic activity in most industrialized economies. Drawing on an array of interdisciplinary theoretical underpinnings stemming from trust, risk, trying, emotion, and consumer satisfaction, this paper proposes an integrated model to examine the causal relationships amid these constructs. The analysis of data from 415 ...

The growth in e-commerce has been mainly in B2B, while B2C is still facing major hurdles associated with consumer acquisition and retention. In the evaluation of B2C businesses, the focus is shifting from measures of visitor attraction such as pageviews and click-through ratios to measures of consumer retention such as stickiness. Most prior research focused on explaining/ predicting the intent...

This paper introduces consumer empowerment as a promising research area. Going beyond lay wisdom that more control is always better, we outline several hypotheses concerning (a) the factors that influence the perception of empowerment, and (b) the consequences of greater control and the subjective experience of empowerment on consumer satisfaction and confidence.

This study proposes the use of product design in the development of new refrigerants. Product design involves the use of consumer preference functions as described by Bagajewicz (2007). Consumer preference functions relate the satisfaction of consumers to different refrigerants based on their properties. The properties examined in this study were toxicity, flammability, explosion potential, glo...

This study examines information technology enabled, multi-channel service context from the end-user’s perspective and, more specifically, from the perspective of a consumer, in particular the extent to which the multi-channel interaction experience results in consumer satisfaction and any tradeoffs that consumers make in the evaluation of the context of service. Empirical results from our onlin...

The availability of informational materials to aid consumer health care purchasing decisions is increasing. Organizations developing and disseminating materials include public- and private-sector employers, providers, purchasing cooperatives, State agencies, counseling programs, and accreditation bodies. Based on case study interviews with 24 organizations, we learned that 10 included consumer ...

The mature consumer segment is growing in number and income level in both China and the US. It is therefore increasingly important for global marketers to develop an understanding of the consumer behavior of this segment as well as any cross-cultural differences in this behavior. This paper focuses on the materialism of mature consumers in China and the US and examines this in terms of cognitiv...

This paper seeks to answer two questions: (1) Do consumers perceive the four service quality dimensions (reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy) differently when interacting with Self-Service Technologies (SSTs) and human agents? and (2) How do these four dimensions affect consumers’ satisfaction when using SSTs versus using human agents? Based on an extensive literature review, we...

Among other aspects, literature has proposed that electronic commerce success depends on usability that consumers perceive in the website they use. However, the study of usability presents important lacks, such as its relationship with advertising effectiveness. This paper proposes that usability influences on advertising effectiveness due to the significative effects of usability on consumer t...