When a customer goes to a fast food restaurant, a café or an ATM, and has to queue for service, does he always accurately and perfectly calculate the benefits and costs of joining before making his decisions? The traditional economics and queueing literature have assumed that he does, while anecdotal evidence and experimental studies point to the contrary. Since the seminal work of Naor (1969),...

The idea of customers’ empowerment in healthcare emerged in response to the rising concern that customers or patients should be able to play a critical role in improving their own health. In traditional healthcare practices, a patient is the recipient of care as well as medical decisions. However, a paradigm shift has taken place – that is, a change from patients who merely receive care to thos...

E-service involves the delivery of service through information technology based service delivery channels such as the Internet. Many e-services are distinguished by the active and significant participation of customers in real-time service design and delivery, a phenomenon referred to as service co-production. Because e-service often involves higher levels of service co-production than in tradi...

Since more and more customers get interested in ecommerce, marketing strategy on the virtual community becomes a major issue. It is important to help companies to determine which potential customers to market to. In this paper, we study the trust relationships between customers on the virtual community and detect influential target groups of interest. We analyze Epinions, a large and popular on...

The front-end phase of the innovation process constitutes up to two-thirds of the total cost of new product development (NPD). In response to the new open innovation paradigm, new ways to integrate customers’ knowledge into the innovation front-end must be explored. In an attempt to learn from analogous situations in which the interface between developers and customers has been managed successf...

Convergence of pervasive technologies, techno-centric customers and the emergence of digitized channels, overabundance of user friendly retail applications are having a profound impact on retail experience, leading to the advent of ‘everywhere retailing’. With the rapid uptake of digital complimentary assets and smart mobile applications are revolutionizing the relationship of retailers with th...

Customer self-service technologies (SST) have been gaining increasing economic importance given their proliferation in the customer service industry. Self-service kiosks have gradually been replacing traditional service employees and their progress is expected to continue. The growing relevance of SST results in the need for companies to understand why customers are willing to use SST and which...

Every business dreams of having committed, loyal and enthusiastic customers. However, many challenges stand in the way. This is especially true of electronic vendors who must not only grapple with the traditional product issues but also technology issues related to competition in the digital economy. Prior studies in information systems have emphasized technology and relational factors such as ...