Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting “insufficient” loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty – people undergoing a so-called “agentic shift” and forsaking rationality for loyalty to a legitimate principal, as when “loyal”...

Loyalty programs, as a prevalent CRM strategy, aim to enhance customers’ loyalty and thereby increase a firm’s long-term profitability. Recent analytical and empirical studies demonstrate inconsistent findings on the efficacy of loyalty programs in fulfilling these goals. In this study, an analytical model is developed to analyze the effect of customers’ valuation and their post-purchase satisf...

Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) employs a model for measuring and quantifying the satisfaction of customers who have used particular products and services. CSI provides a uniform measure of customer satisfaction that allows for comparison across industries and it illustrates how customer satisfaction is embedded in a system of cause–effect relationships. Despite discussions of nonlinear relat...

Purpose – This study discusses and tests the combined role of perceived risk, objective knowledge and certainty as moderators in the satisfaction–loyalty relationship. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use survey data of 387 Vietnamese consumers in a food context. A structural equation modelling (SEM) approach for moderator analysis with latent constructs is used to test the hypotheses....

This research investigates the influence of industry on electronic customer relationship management (ecrm) performance. A case study approach with two cases is applied to evaluate the influence of ecrm on customer behavioral and attitudinal loyalty along with customer pyramid. The cases covered two industries consisting of computer and automotive industries. For investigating customer behaviora...

The extant literature on price promotions typically assumes that consumers loyal to a brand never switch to a competing brand, with Shilony (1977) and Raju et al (1990) being exceptions. Extending the Narasimhan (1988) model, we allow loyal consumers to hold finite brand loyalty. Our unique equilibrium splits into three types, depending upon configurations of consumer reservation utility, brand...

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating role of perceived hidden inflation on the relationships between service quality, brand trust and brand loyalty. All data collected from the target population are analyzed through two-step structural equation modeling (SEM) and moderated multiple regression (MMR) to examine the hypotheses. 1,050 questionnaires are randomly distributed at 21 ...

Loyalty programs are promoted by vendors to incentivize loyalty in buyers. Although such programs have become widespread, they have been criticized by business experts and consumer associations: loyalty results in profiling and hence in loss of privacy of consumers. We propose a protocol for privacy-preserving loyalty programs that allows vendors and consumers to enjoy the benefits of loyalty (...

We show that loyalty discounts create an externality among buyers even without economies of scale or downstream competition, and whether or not buyers make any commitment. Each buyer who signs a loyalty discount contract softens competition and raises prices for all buyers. We prove that, provided the entrant’s cost advantage is not too large, with enough buyers, this externality implies that i...