Essays on Consumer Return Policy Design

Due to the ongoing and dramatic growth in the volume of consumer returns, retailers struggle with the trade-off in returns service strategies between implementing stricter return policies to lower operational costs and environmental footprint versus providing customers with lenient return policies to positively stimulate customers’ value perceptions and patronage intentions. This dissertation contributes to knowledge by providing theoretical and practical insights on managing this trade-off. In particular, the dissertation offers three essays on consumer return policy design. The first essay reviews and classifies the inter-disciplinary and multi-method research on consumer return policy design through a holistic conceptual framework and identifies relatively under-explored as well as unexplored research areas. The second essay investigates, through randomized experiments, how return policy leniency across five leniency levers available to retailers affects consumers’ purchase intentions and proposes a causal mechanism to explain these effects. The results suggest that monetary and exchange levers are the most effective levers in influencing purchase intentions, whereas time, scope, and effort levers are significantly less so. Further, the findings suggest that perceived service quality and perceived transaction costs in parallel and perceived service value in series mediate the effect of return policy leniency across the levers on purchase intentions. The third essay examines how restrictive changes to long-established lenient return policies impact consumer trust in retailers and the resultant favorable behavioral intentions, and how managerial transparency moderates this impact. Results from randomized experiments suggest that restrictive changes to long-established lenient return policies generally result in decreased consumer trust in the retailer and favorable behavioral intentions. This negative effect becomes stronger in the severity of the restriction. However, managerial transparency in the form of communicating the rationale for the change can help to mitigate this negative effect

Internet in the European Union: past, present and future of digitalization

openThe Internet is a complex tool that completely changed the world in recent years, enabling fast connections all over the world, and at the same time giving birth to a new digital economy. To better understand this proces, and particularly to understand what lies ahead for the European Union in terms of policy decisions, it is necessary to analyse the history, the economy and the implications of the internet in the international context. These considerations will be used to reflect on the upcoming challenges, in terms of security, privacy and power that the European Union will have to deal with in the upcoming years

Personalisation through pricing co-creation: Customer’s willingness to pay and pricing strategies in the B2C context of hospitality

In the era of connectivity, personalisation is an increasingly popular phenomenon in the marketplace. Modern customers are more demanding with higher barging power. The evolution towards customer-dominant logic (CDL) illuminates the transmission of value-creating roles to customers beyond visible service interaction. While the advantages of personalising the products and services are evident, a level of ambiguity persists when considering the tacit dimension of a transaction, specifically concerning pricing. The marketing and revenue management literature suggests a linear relationship between personalisation and willingness to pay (WTP). WTP is context-dependent, and further exploring the influence of personalisation benefits on customer WTP is needed. This study aims to explore how customer expectation of personalisation affects WTP in the hospitality industry, using CDL as the theoretical lens. A pragmatism stance guides the methodological design using mixed methods and leans toward the abductive approach as the central concept that derives from existing knowledge. The employed method includes two rounds of data collection: 43 semi-structured in-depth interviews and 202 online self-administrated surveys. The interpretive qualitative analysis identifies six distinctive customer types, namely: Budget Adventures, Family Explorers, Relaxation Seekers, Relation Seekers, Delight Seekers, and Must-Have Customers. Findings suggest consumers are keen to receive personalised offers, but their WTP varies. The findings from the quantitative analysis indicate that the personalisation and customer WTP relationship is not linear. WTP largely depends on the customer’s internal and external context. The study illustrates that specific context influences WTP, customer purchase behaviour, and personalisation expectations. The theoretical contribution is made to the knowledge of marketing and revenue management through CDL by advancing the understanding of experience co-creation, segmentation, and pricing. As a contribution to knowledge and practice, the study offers a novel customer typology and explains the relationship between expectations of personalisation and customer WTP. The strength of this work lies in tangible recommendations for practitioners that should lead managers and decision-makers to concentrate more on different customer clusters at different times to develop effective pricing strategies. Findings can also help managers decide what type of personalisation may best suit their customers’ context and what pricing approach they should take to optimise revenue. The findings can apply widely to other services, like airline, retail, banking, insurance, transportation, logistics, rail, or events. The avenues for future research conclude the thesis

Implementing data-driven systems for work and health: The role of incentives in the use of physiolytics

Following the recent success of health wearable devices (smartwatches, activity trackers) for personal and leisure activities, organizations have started to build digital occupational health programs and data-driven health insurance around these systems. In this way, firms or health insurance companies seek to both support a new form of health promotion for their workforce/clients and to take advantage of large amounts of collected data for organizational purposes. Still, the success in the implementation of wearable health devices (also known as physiolytics) in organizational settings is entirely dependent on the individual motivation to adopt and use physiolytics over time (since organizations cannot establish a mandated use). Therefore, organizations often use incentives to encourage individuals to participate in such data-driven programs. Yet, little is known about these mechanisms that serve to align the interests of an organization with the interests of a group of individuals. This is an important challenge because these incentives may blunder the frontiers between what is voluntary and what is not. Against this background, this thesis aims, from a critical realist perspective, to build general knowledge regarding incentives in physiolytics-centered organizational programs. By doing so, individuals may be able to recognize challenges linked to participation in such programs; organizations may create sensible incentives; policymakers may identify new social issues that appear with this form of digitalization in organizations; and, finally, researchers may investigate new practical and social challenges regarding digitalization in organizations. In concrete terms, the first explorative phase of the thesis shows that feedback, gamification features and financial incentives are the most implemented incentives in physiolytics-centered organizational programs. There is also an overrepresentation of financial incentives for data-health plans, indicating that health insurance companies are building their strategy on external motivators. A second, more explanatory phase serves to further explore these types of incentives and specify recommendations by taking a higher perspective than normative views, so that it is possible to create more alternative managerial strategies or develop other policy perspectives. This part principally shows that the most influential incentives on user behavior are the ones that are transparent, that stimulate individual empowerment, and that propose defined benefits. In terms of contributions, this thesis allows individuals to evaluate how their autonomy and integrity is impacted by incentives in such data-driven programs. This thesis also outlines the necessity for organizations to invest time and resources to know their audience. Organizations additionally need to develop several strategies, by mixing incentives or gradually introducing them. Policymakers must ensure that regulations permit the clear consent of participants; guarantee a proportionality of incentives, and involve entities that can guide individuals through data-sharing. Finally, this thesis enables researchers to further investigate how organizations can develop appropriate and desirable environments regarding data-driven technology, so that individuals may enhance their decision-making processes and organizations may succeed in their implementation

Axmedis 2005

The AXMEDIS conference aims to promote discussions and interactions among researchers, practitioners, developers and users of tools, technology transfer experts, and project managers, to bring together a variety of participants. The conference focuses on the challenges in the cross-media domain (which include production, protection, management, representation, formats, aggregation, workflow, distribution, business and transaction models), and the integration of content management systems and distribution chains, with particular emphasis on cost reduction and effective solutions for complex cross-domain problems

Syringa Networks v. Idaho Department of Administration Clerk\u27s Record v. 1 Dckt. 38735

https://digitalcommons.law.uidaho.edu/idaho_supreme_court_record_briefs/1519/thumbnail.jp

Analyzing new profit opportunities: a guide to making business projects financially successful

This book presents a simple, yet very powerful, conceptual framework, which can be used to estimate market sizes, prices and their interdependency for new products based on historical market data for existing products in related areas. Even in situations where insufficient data is available the methods can be used in a semi-quantitative manner to evaluate the market potential for a given product or find ways to improve upon the product to make it more successful in the marketplace. The methods are explained in detail, examples of practical applications are provided; and the foundation in existing economic theory is discussed

Micro wholesaling businesses involved in the sector of confectionary products - strategies of survival and growth

It can be argued that the problematic situation where micro Greek wholesaling businesses find themselves has been a result of the strong presence of supermarkets and superstores in the last years. The researcher attempts to picture the current market reality that constitutes the background of the Thesis by posing the main research question: "How can micro Greek wholesaling businesses involved in the confectionary products' sector identify and implement suitable survival and growth strategies in order to cope with increasing competition in a market characterized by a large expansion of supermarkets and chain stores?". The factors that triggered research are related to the researcher's avocation with the sector of confectionary products; having worked in a micro family wholesaling enterprise in the past (and still involved in it occasionally when demand for confectionary products is increased), the survival and growth prospects of this firm constitutes an issue of high importance for the researcher and his family. The researcher believes that the study of similar wholesaling firms-case studies would highlight potential survival and growth strategies, useful for the family business; in this way, he holds the view that he contributes to the solution of an intense family problem. Apart from the personal interest for the survival and growth of micro wholesaling firms, it can be argued that the confectionary products' sector is a dynamic field that provides the opportunities to a researcher to evolve to a consultant or a specialist practitioner