The Role of Consumer Behaviour in Service Operations Management

In this thesis, I study the impact of consumer behaviour on service providers’ operations. In the first study, I consider service systems where customers do not know the distribution of uncertain service quality and cannot estimate it fully rationally. Instead, they form their beliefs by taking the average of several anecdotes, the size of which measures their level of bounded rationality. I characterise the customers’ joining behaviour and the service provider’s pricing, quality control, and information disclosure decisions. Bounded rationality induces customers to form different estimates of the service quality and leads the service provider to use pricing as a market segmentation tool, which is radically different from the full rationality setting. When the service provider also has control over quality, I find that it may reduce both quality and price as customers gather more anecdotes. In addition, a high-quality service provider may not disclose quality information if the sample size is small. In the second study, I analyse the performance of opaque selling in countering the negative revenue impact from consumers’ strategic waiting behaviour in vertically differentiated markets. The advantage of opaque selling is to increase the firm’s regular price, whereas the disadvantage lies in the inflexibility of segmenting different types of consumers. Both the advantage and the disadvantage are radically different from their counterparts in horizontally differentiated markets, and this contrast generates opposite policy recommendations across the two settings. In the third study, I investigate an online store’s product return policy when competing with a physical store, in which consumers can try the product before purchase. I find that the online store should offer product return only if it is socially efficient. Moreover, it should allocate product return cost between the online store and the consumers to minimise the total return cost

Online advertising: analysis of privacy threats and protection approaches

Online advertising, the pillar of the “free” content on the Web, has revolutionized the marketing business in recent years by creating a myriad of new opportunities for advertisers to reach potential customers. The current advertising model builds upon an intricate infrastructure composed of a variety of intermediary entities and technologies whose main aim is to deliver personalized ads. For this purpose, a wealth of user data is collected, aggregated, processed and traded behind the scenes at an unprecedented rate. Despite the enormous value of online advertising, however, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of these practices prompt serious privacy concerns. This article surveys the online advertising infrastructure and its supporting technologies, and presents a thorough overview of the underlying privacy risks and the solutions that may mitigate them. We first analyze the threats and potential privacy attackers in this scenario of online advertising. In particular, we examine the main components of the advertising infrastructure in terms of tracking capabilities, data collection, aggregation level and privacy risk, and overview the tracking and data-sharing technologies employed by these components. Then, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the most relevant privacy mechanisms, and classify and compare them on the basis of their privacy guarantees and impact on the Web.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Tracing Method for Pricing Inter-Area Electricity Trades

In the context of liberalisation of electricity markets world wide, the need for agreed protocols for electricity trades between systems with different charges poses a special challenge. System operators need to know how much a given trade uses the network, in order to allocate an appropriate portion of their costs to that trade. This paper discusses a technique, tracing, for determining how much each of a number of trades uses different parts of the electricity network. The scheme is based on the assumption that at any network node, inflows are shared proportionally between outflows (and vice versa). The paper outlines the technique and shows how it could be applied to the problem of charging cross-border trades. The paper goes on to demonstrate that the technique has a game theoretic rationale, in that it produces the Shapley value solution to a game equivalent to this allocation problem

Questioning the Use of Opaque Web Practices Among Low-Cost Airline Carriers

Modest attention has been given to the subtle ethical issues of ¿best practice¿ on the Internet, such as the exploitation of Web technologies to inhibit or avoid customer service. Increasingly, some firms are using Websites to create distance between themselves and their consumers in specific areas of their operations, while simultaneously developing excellence in sales transaction completion via selfservice. This paper examines findings from a study on the self-service Websites of low-cost airline carriers (LCCs) in Ireland. The LCCs¿ adoption of technology has meant more efficient flight options and enhanced price transparency within the industry. Yet despite advances, a number of LCCs use their information systems in a conflicting manner when managing customer interactions. The ¿opaque¿ Web practices many LCCs employ appear to be intentional in design and are contrary to the ethos of designing a ¿good system¿. Accordingly, the LCC sector has come under greater scrutiny for engaging in ¿unfair practices¿ and violating consumer protection law. The paper notes the teaching of information systems development (ISD) and marketing assumes ethicality in their practice. While these business disciplines are central to the success of self-service Websites, there is a gap between the disciplines¿ theoretical ideals and their practice.peer-reviewe

Techniques and applications for predictive metallurgy and ore

peer reviewe

Professional football in Portugal: preparing to resume after the COVID-19 pandemic

This article offers a theoretical reflection on how the First Portuguese Football League is preparing to return to competition, after the suspension and mandatory confinement, as well as the security measures adopted in response to the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus. Despite the paper is descriptive and theoretical, our discussion draws particularly on the documentary analysis of mass media/journalist reports, official almanacs, and academic works. The first purpose of this paper, therefore, is to address the way in which professional football is financially exposed and vulnerable to the main sponsors, who seek to exert power and influence. Second, we seek to explore the increasing asymmetrical power relations of the broadcaster’s rights that are increasingly using strategies for wielding power than act a business partner. The implications arising from the study are considered for sport-governing bodies and clubs, in addition to future research directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Supply Chain and Service Operations with Demand-Side Flexibility

In this thesis, we consider improving supply chain and service systems through demand-side management. In Chapters 1 and 2, we focus on a new notion of flexibility that has emerged in e-commerce called consumer flexibility. Motivated by the fact that some customers may willingly provide flexibility on which product or service they receive in exchange for a reward, firms can design flexible options to leverage this consumer flexibility for significant benefit in their operations. In Chapter 1, we consider the context of online retailing where consumer flexibility can be realized through opaque selling, where some specific attributes of the products are not revealed to the customer until after purchase. In Chapter 2, we focus on the context of online booking systems for scheduled services where consumer flexibility can be realized through large time windows. The main findings are on the power of limited flexibility using simple flexible options with just a small fraction of customers willing to be flexible. In Chapter 3, we study the issue of congested elevator queuing systems due to the requirement of social distancing during a pandemic. We propose simple interventions for safely managing the elevator queues, which require no programming of the elevator system and only manage passenger behaviors. The key idea is to explicitly or implicitly group passengers going to the same or nearby floor into the same elevator as much as possible. Simulations and stability analysis show that our proposed interventions significantly reduce queue length and wait time

The Spanish Electricity Industry: Plus ca Change

Working paper públicado por el Instituto de Economía Industrial. serie nº 317,IDEI Working papersIn this paper we describe the Spanish electricity industry and its current regulatory regime. Special emphasis is given to the description and discussion of market design issues (including stranded cost recovery), the evolution of market structure, investment in generation capacity and network activities. We also provide a critical assessment of the 1997 regulatory reform, which did not succeed in introducing effective competition, but retained an opaque regulation which has been subject to continuous governmental interventionism. Furthermore, the implementation of the Kyoto agreement could show the lack of robustness of the regulatory regime