Sellers of almost any product or service rarely keep their prices constant through time, and frequently offer price discounts or sales. This paper investigates an explanation of sales as a way for uninformed consumers to be willing to experience the product, and learn about its fit, and where informed consumers may forget about (or change) their preferences. We investigate the role of the rate ...

Vendors that foster their customer relationships via internal sales agents can choose from a broad range of customer relationship management systems. Independent sales agencies on the other hand do not have such a choice. The results from two studies presented in this paper indicate that these sales agencies would benefit from mobile applications with end-to-end multi-vendor support. Especially...

We propose a time-dependent network of innnite-server queues to help a service provider manage a family of private-line telecommunication services. The queueing network is used to model switching from one service to another. The relevant time scale is quite long: service lifetimes are measured in years, while service life cycles are measured in decades. To capture changing technology and custom...

The study empirically tests a hierarchical second order model of customer perceived service quality for retail banking services with a first order model to develop better understanding of the structure of the concept. The results show that the service quality construct conforms to the structure of a second order factor model consisting of the dimensions of Service Delivery, Core Service, Tangib...

Emerging literature on the impact of the Internet on business-to-business (B2B) marketing has primarily focused on examining this issue from the perspective of manufacturers and buyers. This study focuses on the sales agent, a third prominent actor in B2B markets, and tests a conceptual model that relates a sales agent’s personality, demographic, and user-situational constructs to that sales ag...

INTRODUCTION Philadelphia enacted its Clean Indoor Air Act (CIAA) nearly 2 years before the statewide CIAA. In this study, we assessed the economic impact of CIAAs on 4 types of food services and drinking places and addressed the predominant limitation of previous pre-post ban studies, namely the lack of control for confounders and changes in secular trends over time. METHODS We analyzed data...

Requirements engineering (RE) is typically associated with the creation of a service or product. Its activities are usually not immediately considered to be part of the pre-sales phase. Yet, not only salesbut a lot of requirements engineering activities actually do occur during this phase. Besides tender processes where customers provide a detailed Request for Proposal (RfP) and a potential con...

OBJECTIVES (1) To describe promotional activities, particularly student-led, targeting lower-fat à la carte foods that were conducted in secondary schools; and (2) to describe the relationships between the number and duration of total promotional activities for lower-fat à la carte foods and cafeteria sales of such foods over two years. DESIGN Promotional activities were implemented in school...

In this paper, we propose a coalition formation protocol, called BSCA-P, that allows intelligent agents to negotiate game-theoretically stable coalitions for Web service trading with a maximum of individual monetary profit, while keeping certain kinds of financial data private. We show that no agent has to reveal its local service sales value and final payoff, and can achieve a certain degree o...

The third-party e-commerce platform is now widely adopted by small and medium sized retailers. For the retailer, commission fee and service level provided by the platform are two key factors influencing the pricing strategy and sales profit. However, these two factors are rarely considered in previous operations models. Taking both factors into consideration, we formulate the decision-making pr...