Essays on the Role of Customer Expectation in Service Markets.

Customer expectations have been considered as customers' pre-purchase beliefs or evaluative beliefs about a product or service. When making a choice, customers first construct their expectations of what is to come whenever they receive new information within a context that is based on the past events. From firms' perspective, a tension exists between raising expectations to increase initial acceptance/trial and lowering expectations to increase satisfaction, and hence future sales. As such, it should come as no surprise that service firms are interested in better understanding how consumers form expectations about quality to manage customer expectations over time. This thesis comprises of two essays where I demonstrate the role of customer expectation in (1) customer satisfaction and repurchase and (2) strategic customer behavior under bounded rationality and its impact on product switching. In the first essay, I examine the value of measuring customer satisfaction. Many service firms keep track of customer satisfaction ratings, along with objective service performance, after each purchase transaction. I find that customer satisfaction provides additional information about customer purchase behavior over and above objective service performance. Unlike past research, these results are obtained after controlling for within-customer selection (of service encounters). Overall, the results suggest that measuring customer satisfaction is valuable because it helps firms to better predict their economic outcomes. The second essay focuses on customers' product switching behavior based on their expectations under bounded rationality by modeling time-varying customer expectations under imperfect recall and their impact on product switching behavior over time. I find evidence of a decline in carryover of prior expectations and imperfect recall of previous service encounter, which supports my hypothesis on bounded rationality in customer expectations. Furthermore, the results show that customers strategically choose the same alternative that previously results in a free upgrade, anticipating yet another upgrade in a subsequent transaction.PhDBusiness AdministrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133218/1/jihoonch_1.pd

Hybrid-Fusion Transformer for Multisequence MRI

Medical segmentation has grown exponentially through the advent of a fully convolutional network (FCN), and we have now reached a turning point through the success of Transformer. However, the different characteristics of the modality have not been fully integrated into Transformer for medical segmentation. In this work, we propose the novel hybrid fusion Transformer (HFTrans) for multisequence MRI image segmentation. We take advantage of the differences among multimodal MRI sequences and utilize the Transformer layers to integrate the features extracted from each modality as well as the features of the early fused modalities. We validate the effectiveness of our hybrid-fusion method in three-dimensional (3D) medical segmentation. Experiments on two public datasets, BraTS2020 and MRBrainS18, show that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on the task of brain tumor segmentation and brain structure segmentation.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Exploring Warning Messages On Conditional Principles & Predicting Social Behavior

A wide variety of alcohol warning (or moderation) messages, as integrated communication tools, have been designed to reduce or moderate consumer attitudes toward alcohol consumption. The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between alcohol warning messages and alcohol consumption attitudes or behavior. In particular, this study investigates the effects of alcohol warning messages on consumer attitudes, subjective norms, intentions to switch alcohol consumption, and eventual behavioral change, by applying an extended Fishbein model. Further, these effects are based on types of messages examined by qualitative research, such as 1) positive or negative reinforcement warnings, 2) one-sided vs. two-sided warnings, and 3) self- vs. other-related warnings. This paper conducted both qualitative and quantitative researches. Results of quantitative researches from surveys are measured by statistical analyses using chi-square, factor, and regression analysis. The results indicate that alcohol warning messages positively affected consumer attitudes toward reduction or moderation of alcohol consumption and that different types of ads produced different results. This study provides managerial implications for alcohol warning and advertising-related policies

Cryptographic Approaches To Security and Privacy Issues In Pervasive Computing

Technological innovation has enabled tiny devices to participate in pervasive com- puting. Such devices are particularly vulnerable to security and privacy threats, because of their limited computing resources and relatively weak physical security. We investigate possible cryptographic solutions to security and privacy problems arising in two kinds of emerging pervasive computing networks: Personal Area Net- works (PANs) and the EPCglobal Network. A number of key management schemes have been proposed for use in PANs, but these schemes only support key management within a PAN. However, as people are increasingly equipped with multiple wireless devices, PANs are likely to be intercon- nected to share information or services. We introduce a term, iPANs, to name such interconnected PANs. We define system models and design goals for key manage- ment in iPANs, and propose a novel security initialisation scheme for use in iPANs. The proposed scheme achieves desirable security and efficiency properties by making use of the unique characteristics of PANs. The EPCglobal Network is designed to give efficiency and cost savings in and beyond the supply chain using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology; however, privacy threats affecting such networks are particularly serious. We construct a formal privacy model for RFID systems accurately reflecting adversarial threats and power. We then give brief privacy analysis for the existing privacy-enhanced RFID schemes which have received wide attention in the literature. We then construct a secure refresh-based RFID system based on re-encryption techniques, and prove its privacy using the defined privacy model. Finally, we show that the proposed scheme can greatly enhance the security and privacy of EPC tags, making the maximum use of given tag functionalities as specified in the standards

The Value of Measuring Customer Satisfaction

A growing number of service firms now collect customer satisfaction ratings, along with objective service performance measures, for each service transaction. However, little is known about whether these two types of data are substitutes or complements, from both a conceptual and an applied point of view. This paper answers this question via the use of unique data consisting of individual-level cross-sectional and time-series measures of objective service performance, customer satisfaction, and purchase behavior. Using theory from the customer satisfaction literature, the data are applied to a two stage model of customer satisfaction and interpurchase time. The results suggest that the two sources of data provide complementary insights. In other words, customer satisfaction data provide information on business outcomes over and above that obtained from objective service performance data. The benefit of using and the cost of collecting these data are also quantified. The results are consistent across two different - quick service restaurant and auto rental - service industries, suggesting that they may be generalizable.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113095/1/1283_Manchanda.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113095/4/1283_Manchanda_Oct2015.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113095/6/1283_Cho_Jan2017.pdfDescription of 1283_Manchanda_Oct2015.pdf : October 2015 RevisionDescription of 1283_Cho_Jan2017.pdf : January 2017 revisio

An Examination of Student Loans, Partisanship and Complaining Behavior: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

This research examines consumer complaints within a government-to-consumer context. The study is focused on two highly discussed topics, student loans and partisanship. While student loans are widely promoted to college students, outstanding U.S. student loan debt trails only consumer debt. Similarly, a stark contrast exists between the views of the two major political parties within the U.S. Our examination provides a nuanced view of partisanship and its effect on complaining behaviors within the student loan realm. Specifically, our study investigates whether partisanship affects the level of student loan complaints submitted to a federal agency initiated during partisan division. Our contributions include the use of a diverse, integrated database that enables insights into complaining behaviors within an understudied area, the government-to-consumer context

Caspase-3 Activation via Mitochondria Is Required for Long-Term Depression and AMPA Receptor Internalization

NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic modifications, such as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), are essential for brain development and function. LTD occurs mainly by the removal of AMPA receptors from the postsynaptic membrane, but the underlying molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we show that activation of caspase-3 via mitochondria is required for LTD and AMPA receptor internalization in hippocampal neurons. LTD and AMPA receptor internalization are blocked by peptide inhibitors of caspase-3 and -9. In hippocampal slices from caspase-3 knockout mice, LTD is abolished whereas LTP remains normal. LTD is also prevented by overexpression of the anti-apoptotic proteins XIAP or Bcl-xL, and by a mutant Akt1 protein that is resistant to caspase-3 proteolysis. NMDA receptor stimulation that induces LTD transiently activates caspase-3 in dendrites, without causing cell death. These data indicate an unexpected causal link between the molecular mechanisms of apoptosis and LTD.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Fellowship F32-NS046126)National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Intramural Research ProgramNational Institute of Mental Health (U.S.

Quantitative Comparison of Vertebral Structural Changes After Percutaneous Vertebroplasty Between Unilateral Extrapedicular Approach and Bilateral Transpedicular Approach Using Voxel-Based Morphometry

Objective To compare unilateral extrapedicular vertebroplasty (UEV) and bilateral transpedicular vertebroplasty (BTV) by quantitatively calculating the structural changes of fractured vertebral body after percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) using 3-dimensional voxel-based morphometry (VBM). Methods We calculated bone cement volume (BCV); vertebral body volume (VBV); leaked intradiscal BCV; and spatial, symmetric, and even bone cement distribution (BCD) in and out of 222 vertebral bodies treated with 2 different PVPs using VBM and evaluated the incidence of subsequent vertebral compression fracture (SVCF). Statistical analyses were conducted to compare values between the 2 different PVPs. Results Relative BCV, which is a potential risk factor for SVCF, was higher in the BTV group based on the data using VBM (0.22±0.03 vs. 0.29±0.03; p<0.001, t-test); however, the SVCF incidence between the 2 surgeries was not significantly different (UEV, 24.7%; BTV, 31%; p=0.046, chi-square test). Spatial, even, and symmetric BCD along the 3 axes was not significantly different between UEV and BTV using VBM (x, y, z-axis, p=0.893, p=0.590, p=0.908 respectively, chi-square test). Conclusion Contrary to intuitive concerns, UEV can inject a sufficient and more optimal BCV than BTV. Additionally, it can inject bone cement spatially, symmetrically, and evenly well-distributed without an increased rate of intradiscal leakage and SVCF compared with BTV based on VBM. Therefore, UEV could be a superior alternative surgical method with similar clinical effectiveness and safety, considering the above results and the consensus that UEV is less invasive