Managing Customers and Motivating Employees for Success in the Frontlines

This dissertation is comprised of three papers in the field of frontline marketing, which examines the influence of servicescape, frontline employee (FLE), and service encounter expectations on customer and company outcomes. The first chapter examines the influence of the servicescape on customers’ tipping behaviors. Through the field and lab experiments, I find that customers’ status perception is a key mechanism that drives their tipping behaviors, and, more importantly, that subtle elements of the servicescape imbued with status perception (i.e., the color of service props) increases tip sizes in restaurants. In the second chapter, I investigate boundary conditions for an important work motivator for FLE, organizational identification (OI). Using meta-analytic techniques, I find that OI, which is defined as individual’s sense of oneness with the organization, improves FLE’s in-role performance the most when the work itself is not meaningful. This finding implies that OI is most beneficial when the work itself provides workers with limited opportunity to experience a sense of autonomy (e.g., tellers), competence (e.g., food service workers), or relatedness (e.g., delivery personnel). Finally, in the third chapter, I examine the impact of psychological distances evoked by customers’ story on service encounter evaluation. Drawing construal level theory, I developed predictions that psychologically distant story enhances prospective customers’ narrative transportation, which in turn increases positive service encounter evaluations. I also hypothesize that this distal story effects are strengthened when those who have high need for cognition evaluate intangible service encounter, because their dispositional characteristics that enjoy thinking. The findings across four studies based on unobtrusive field study and series of experiment consistently support my hypothesis. This study contributes to the service marketing literature by revealing how storytellers’ distal stories can positively influence customers’ future service encounter evaluation

Vehicle Secrecy Parameters for V2V Communications

This paper studies the parameters affecting secrecy capacity in vehicle communication. The vehicle secrecy parameters largely include vehicle driving-related parameters, antenna-related parameters for transmitting and receiving signals, path-related parameters for indirect communication, and noise-related parameters using a fading channel. Although many researches have been conducted on antenna-related parameters and noise-related parameters considered in general wireless communication, relatively little research has been made on parameters caused by the vehicle itself. These vehicle secrecy parameters also imply that secrecy capacity can be varied by the user. In the future, this study will be a very informative topic when trying to perform vehicle communication while maintaining a certain level of security capacity. In the coming autonomous driving era, this research is very necessary and will help to carry out vehicle communications more safely

Automatic 3D Model Generation based on a Matching of Adaptive Control Points

Abstract The use of a 3D model helps to diagnosis and accurately locate a disease where it is neither available, nor can be exactly measured in a 2D image. Therefore, highly accurate software for a 3D model of vessel is required for an accurate diagnosis of patients. We have generated standard vessel because the shape of the arterial is different for each individual vessel, where the standard vessel can be adjusted to suit individual vessel. In this paper, we propose a new approach for an automatic 3D model generation based on a matching of adaptive control points. The proposed method is carried out in three steps. First, standard and individual vessels are acquired. The standard vessel is acquired by a 3D model projection, while the individual vessel of the first segmented vessel bifurcation is obtained. Second is matching the corresponding control points between the standard and individual vessels, where a set of control and corner points are automatically extracted using the Harris corner detector. If control points exist between corner points in an individual vessel, it is adaptively interpolated in the corresponding standard vessel which is proportional to the distance ratio. And then, the control points of corresponding individual vessel match with those control points of standard vessel. Finally, we apply warping on the standard vessel to suit the individual vessel using the TPS (Thin Plate Spline) interpolation function. For experiments, we used angiograms of various patients from a coronary angiography in Sanggye Paik Hospital