Internet portals have been using the email service to attract new members and to retain existing customers. This research aims to enhance the understanding of mechanisms associated to users' intention for email switching (IES). We have employed customer's satisfaction on email service, attractive alternatives, and switching cost to explain the dynamics of IES. Customer's satisfaction is measure...

Many Internet vendors have realized the importance of “locking-in” online customers in order to ensure their profitability. For this reason, many researchers have paid attention to the formation of switching costs which acting as a barrier that prevent customers from easily changing from one vendor to another. Erection of switching barriers will represent an important strategy for locking in cu...

Customer acquisition and retention are two phases of an e-commerce life cycle. Switching costs and perceived risks affect both, but in different ways. This study examines these two well known, often contradicting variables in an integrated frame work and asks: Can perceived risks complement switching costs to give rises to new customer loyalty strategies for e-commerce enterprises? That is, do ...

Firms have an increasing need today to develop a sourcing strategy that is more strategic than in years past. Firms need to maintain a strategy of adaptability in order to mitigate the risks associated with outsourcing. A major influence on the adaptability of a firm in the shortand long-term is the switching costs associated with bring an outsourced activity back inhouse (backsource) or switch...

This paper analyzes an infinite-period oligopoly model where consumers incur costs when switching supplier. Every period only a fraction α of consumers considers switching. Firms can price-discriminate between their current customers and consumers who did not buy from the firm in the past period. In this setting, firms set relatively low introductory prices to attract new consumers. Contrary to...

This article estimates worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers. I use data on engineers across Swedish private sector firms to estimate the relative importance of employer wage policies and switching costs in a dynamic programming, discrete choice model of employer choice. The differentiated firms are modeled in employe...

It is well-known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. We show that introducing consumer heterogeneity tends to increase the critical switching cost and thereby reduce the stability of the collusive outcome. A testable implication is that widesp...

This paper deals with minimization of the variances of the total discounted costs for constrained Continuous-Time Markov Decision Processes (CTMDPs). The costs consist of cumulative costs incurred between jumps and instant costs incurred at jump epochs. We interpret discounting as an exponentially distributed stopping time. According to existing theory, for the expected total discounted costs o...

This paper investigates firms’ decisions to reimburse consumers’ switching costs in network industries. Prior literature finds that switching costs incentivize firms to harvest their locked-in consumers rather than price aggressively for market dominance, thereby resulting in a lower market concentration. Using a dynamic duopoly model, we show that this result is reversed if firms have the opti...