We conduct a field study with a US health insurance firm to examine how product customization affects firm’s cost to serve the customers through its call center. In our setting, the product is a complex health insurance plan. Firm incurs substantial cost in serving the customers through its call center, and adjudicating the claims using its information systems. Firm sells either standard plans,...

Single parenthood as a common psychosocial phenomenon seems to be regarded as one of the most significant issues in the psychological domain and needs to be taken into serious consideration due to emotional, psychological, and social problems created by it. With regard to the rapidly growing population of single parents and their children experiencing relationship-based problems, interventions ...

Information technology, especially social media, has fundamentally changed the way of firm-customer interactions and has shifted more power to customers. Although an increasing number of firms are aware of increased customer power and the importance of co-creation, how to convert customer power into value of co-creation is unclear. In order to fill this gap in the literature, drawing on social ...

Many firms operate customer communities online. This is motivated by the belief that customers who join the community become more engaged with the firm and/or its products, and as a result, increase their economic activity with the firm. We describe this potential economic benefit as “social dollars.” This paper contributes evidence for the existence and source of social dollars using data from...

Customer churn prediction is a challenging domain of research that contributes to customer retention strategy. The predictive performance existing machine learning models, which are often adopted by communities, appear be at bottleneck, partly due models' poor feature extraction capability. Therefore, novel algorithm, hybrid neural network with self-attention enhancement (HNNSAE), proposed in t...

T he term emotional intelligence (EI) has been advanced to describe the set of personal attributes that enhance social and professional relationships. As developed by Goleman and Mayer et al, the elements of EI encompass the full range of interactions between individuals and society, including self-awareness, social awareness, self-regulation, and relationship management (Figure). Of these, the...