The perspective of customers and repair companies

Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s)Using repair services instead of new purchases creates local added value and contributes to a circular economy. The main aim of this research was to characterize repair service convenience for customers and to investigate ways to increase convenience to make repairs more attractive for customers, as the construct service convenience has neither been used nor adapted to a repair context until now. For this purpose, focus group interviews with potential customers of repair companies and interactive workshops with repair companies were conducted in the region of Styria (Austria). Findings state that a variety of factors like lack of information regarding repair services and product repairability, inconvenient store hours, or long waits reduce repair service convenience. However, due to skilled labor shortage, long delivery times of spare parts, or lacking financial resources for advertisements, repair companies can only partially improve convenience. Considering that, interventions from different actors, for example, the local government are needed as they can increase convenience by organizing awareness/information events, repair networks, or central repair-points. Hence, this study highlights once more the necessity to collaborate with different stakeholders (including customers, repair companies, local initiatives, and governments) to successfully transform the linear economy to a circular economy.publishersversionpublishe

Drivers of the consumers’ intention to use repair services, repair networks and to self-repair

Repair is a central component of a circular economy to extend the operational phase of products. Yet, the number of repair service providers as well as demand for repair have declined over the last decades, while more products than ever before were sold. Thus, for a successful transition from a linear to a circular economy the demand for repair services must be boosted to promote repair business. A starting point to achieve this goal is to increase knowledge about the end consumers’ intention whether to repair broken products or not. An extensive literature research revealed a comprehensive set of drivers of the repair intention covering aspects related to environmental protection, social acceptance, and economic considerations as well as socio-demographic variables, past behaviour, and perceived repair difficulty. Those factors are not only relevant for a specific product category but for repairs of consumer goods in general. The aim is to evaluate the relevance of those drivers for three different repair intentions: (1) to make use of repair service providers, (2) to self-repair broken items, and (3) to use repair service providers incorporated in a repair network. A quantitative online survey was designed, and distributed in Styria, Austria. By means of a structural equation model the acquired data of 900 respondents was analysed. The results emphasise the trade-off between acting environmentally-friendly and economic aspects like repair cost and time, but also highlight the effect of government intervention – in the form of setting up a network and financial support for repair – on shaping this trade-off. Furthermore, past behaviour is found to strongly drive repair intention. Our research contributes to scientific literature by shedding light on the influence of diverse drivers on different repair intentions. It is also relevant for supporting repair companies’ decision making with respect to repair service design, as well as public authorities interested in promoting repair

Exploring a regional repair network with a public funding scheme for customer repairs: The ‘GRAZ repariert’-case

Repair is an essential part of the transition towards a circular economy by recovering full functionality of faulty products or components, and thus, extending the product usage phase. This is seen as a core strategy to obtain desired environmental impact like waste reduction and resource conservation. Beyond that, repair services also affect societal and economic aspects like the number of local jobs. To realize the potential, supply with as well as demand for repair services has to be ensured. In this study we report on how the city of Graz, Austria deals with challenges related to this by introducing a public funding scheme for repair services to increase demand, and funding and organizing a repair network to strengthen the suppliers. By means of a case study, we explore success factors and critical aspects related to setting up a repair network, and provide insights into the interplay of a financial incentive scheme for promoting repair. Key findings show that: (1) having the local government as the network organizer facilitates the integration of multiple sectors but might jeopardize the network's sustainability due to political reasons; (2) the interplay between public funding and the repair network is effective, but network heterogeneity induces risk; (3) cooperation within the network can improve price and service quality and thus, affect customer demand, but lacking awareness of repair in general and the repair network constrains demand. These insights and the related discussion result in the identification of future research opportunities and related questions

Importance rating of various operational aspects related to repair service processes

<h3>Contextual information</h3><p>The survey considers the scenario that repairs are conducted at a repair service centre but not as a repair service at home as, e.g., for washing machines. This allowed to split the sample into four groups, each of it referring to a different portable product to be repaired (bicycle, smartphone, vacuum cleaner and a generic product) in order to examine the generalisability of the results.</p><p>The survey is based on items related to repair operations and provides data concerning the importance of the different items. It considers the scenario that repairs are conducted at a repair service centre but not as a repair service at home as, e.g., for washing machines. The operational aspects concern three different stages of the repair process that can be influenced by the repair company: the prepurchase, service encounter, and post-encounter stage. Furthermore, socio-demographic data is included.</p><h3>Description of the data and file structure</h3><p>The dataset contains 107 aspects identified for potential improvement of repair operations. The importance of operational aspects was rated by survey participants on a 7-point Likert scale (extremely important to not at all important). Three additional questions for quality control (e.g., 'Please tick 1 = extremely important') tested the attention of the participants. </p><p>File 'Translation_of_items.ods' contains the items in German (original version) and English (translated). File 'Description_of_Data.ods' contains a description of the variables.</p><ul><li>We removed all answers with completion time of less than five minutes, as the pre-test showed that this was the minimum time for a focused completion of the survey.</li><li>All data rows with wrongly answered control questions were removed.</li></ul&gt

Digitalized Mobility

In our research commentary, we take up the topic of the digitalization of mobility and show how digital technologies impact mobility and transport. We describe the four main characteristics of Digitalized Mobility, (i) people and goods, (ii) infrastructure, (iii) mobility and transport data, and (iv) data-driven services, so-called digitalized mobility services. In a conceptual, multilayered model with the three building blocks (1) mobility and transport artifacts, (2) data storage and processing and (3) Digitalized Mobility Services, we outline how data-based services ultimately emerge from the data generated within the mobility and transport ecosystem and illustrate this process in a fictitious case study. Finally, in our research agenda, we capture research questions on digitalized mobility relevant to the IS community

Adapting Axelrod’s cultural dissemination model for simulating peer effects

We present a generic method for considering incomplete but gradually expandable sociological data in agent-based modeling based on the classic model of cultural dissemination by Axelrod. Our method extension was inspired by research on the diffusion of citizen photovoltaic initiatives, i.e. by initiatives in which citizens collectively invest in photovoltaic plants and share the profits. Owing to the absence of empirical interaction parameters, the Axelrod model was used as basis for considering peer effects with contrived interaction data that can be updated from empirical surveys later on. The Axelrod model was extended to cover the following additional features: • Consideration of empirical social science data for concrete social interaction. • Development of a variable and fine-tunable interaction function for agents. • Deployment of a generic procedure for modeling peer effects in agent-based models

A Research Agenda for Vehicle Information Systems

As modern cars have transformed to computers on wheels, digitalization is an important driver of ser-vice and business innovation within the automotive domain. As a new class of information systems (IS), vehicle information systems (Vehicle IS) are enabled through the data generated by a plethora of different sensors within modern vehicles, meshed up with data from a variety of different other sources. Expecting the awareness on and the needs for Vehicle IS to steadily increase in the future - as a result of the continuing provision of driver assistance systems towards fully automation - we investigate existing literature on Vehicle IS published by the academic IS community. To get an overview on topics discussed so far as well as publication activity in general, we use the AIS Electronic Library as an indicator. We then provide a definition of the term ‘vehicle information system’ and give an overview of relevant research directions with a set of example research questions, which we deem important for the academic IS community to advance the state-of-the-art in designing Vehicle IS