Service attribute importance and strategic planning: An empirical study

There is growing evidence that attribute importance is a function of attribute performance. Several studies reported that service quality attributes fall into three categories: basic, performance, and excitement. Thus, the identification of attribute importance is significantly important as a key to customer satisfaction evaluation and other behavioural intentions. According to customer behaviour literature, attribute importance can be measured in two ways: (1) self-stated importance, and (2) statistically inferred importance. The article evaluates two methods according to their impact on overall customer satisfaction measurement and, managerial implementation. A case study is conducted on the telecommunication industry for analysis

Bounding the Greedy Strategy in Finite-Horizon String Optimization

We consider an optimization problem where the decision variable is a string of bounded length. For some time there has been an interest in bounding the performance of the greedy strategy for this problem. Here, we provide weakened sufficient conditions for the greedy strategy to be bounded by a factor of $(1-(1-1/K)^K)$, where $K$ is the optimization horizon length. Specifically, we introduce the notions of $K$-submodularity and $K$-GO-concavity, which together are sufficient for this bound to hold. By introducing a notion of \emph{curvature} $\eta\in(0,1]$, we prove an even tighter bound with the factor $(1/\eta)(1-e^{-\eta})$. Finally, we illustrate the strength of our results by considering two example applications. We show that our results provide weaker conditions on parameter values in these applications than in previous results.Comment: This paper has been accepted by 2015 IEEE CD