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Conference Sessions - Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of ...

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FD15<br />

■ FD15<br />

Champions Center V<br />

CRM VI: Customer Satisfaction<br />

Contributed Session<br />

Chair: Jiana-Fu Wang, Assistant Pr<strong>of</strong>essor, National Chung Hsing<br />

University, 250 Kuo Kuang Rd., Taichung, Taiwan - ROC,<br />

jfwang@dragon.nchu.edu.tw<br />

1 - Modeling Determinants <strong>of</strong> the Satisfaction-loyalty Relationship:<br />

Theoretical and Empirical Evidence<br />

Young Han Bae, Doctoral Student, University <strong>of</strong> Iowa, Tippie College<br />

<strong>of</strong> Business, 108 PBB S252, Iowa City, IA, 52242-1994,<br />

United States <strong>of</strong> America, younghan-bae@uiowa.edu,<br />

Gary J. Russell, Lopo Rego<br />

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are central constructs to marketing research and<br />

practice since they reflect how effectively firms deliver value to their customers, and<br />

because they are important determinants <strong>of</strong> current and future product-marketplace<br />

and financial performance. In this study, we develop a comprehensive and flexible<br />

theoretical framework for analyzing the association between customer satisfaction<br />

and customer loyalty, which also incorporates competitive setting differences. This<br />

theoretical framework is grounded in more than 40 years <strong>of</strong> academic and<br />

practitioner research on the association between these two constructs and allows us<br />

to more precisely examine the true nature <strong>of</strong> the association between satisfaction and<br />

loyalty. Additionally, we test our theoretical framework by estimating an empirical<br />

hierarchical linear model, using American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) data<br />

and several customer, firm and industry characteristics. Our findings indicate that the<br />

true nature <strong>of</strong> the association between satisfaction and loyalty is significantly<br />

influenced by context. Controlling for such differences allows firms and managers to<br />

significantly increase their ability to effectively convert satisfaction investments into<br />

loyalty. Additionally, we identify significant decreasing marginal returns for customer<br />

satisfaction investments, as well as important trade-<strong>of</strong>fs between intercept and slope<br />

on the association between the two metrics. Our study provides important<br />

theoretical, managerial and regulatory insights, and broadens our understanding <strong>of</strong><br />

the essential features <strong>of</strong> the satisfaction-loyalty association.<br />

2 - Does the Variance in Customer Satisfaction Matter for<br />

Firm Performance?<br />

Eun Young Lee, Doctoral Student, Korea University Business <strong>School</strong>,<br />

Anam-dong Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, 136-701, Seoul, 136-701, Korea,<br />

Republic <strong>of</strong>, eyey@korea.ac.kr, Shijin Yoo, Dong Wook Lee,<br />

Sundar Bharadwaj<br />

Although much attention has been paid by both academics and corporate managers<br />

to customer satisfaction as a leading indicator <strong>of</strong> firm performance for many years,<br />

relatively little is known about the role <strong>of</strong> its variance. We investigate the relationship<br />

between the variance <strong>of</strong> customer satisfaction and three different dimensions <strong>of</strong> firm<br />

performance: accounting performance (i.e., revenue and pr<strong>of</strong>it), Tobin’s Q ratio, and<br />

stock return. Based on National Customer Satisfaction Index (NCSI) data collected by<br />

Korea Productivity Center in a last decade, we obtain three main findings. First, we<br />

confirm the findings <strong>of</strong> extant literature – mostly based on US data – that the average<br />

customer satisfaction is positively related to the firm performance. Second, we find<br />

that the variance <strong>of</strong> customer satisfaction negatively moderates the relationship<br />

between the mean <strong>of</strong> customer satisfaction and firm performance, i.e., the average<br />

customer satisfaction level is more strongly related to firm performance when the<br />

variance <strong>of</strong> customer satisfaction is low. Finally, the variance <strong>of</strong> customer satisfaction<br />

is found to directly affect firm performance as well. More specifically, the variance<br />

increases the sales and decreases the stock return. Academic and managerial<br />

implications are also discussed.<br />

3 - The Impact <strong>of</strong> Online Railway Ticket Cancellation Policy on Revenue<br />

and Customer Satisfaction<br />

Jiana-Fu Wang, Assistant Pr<strong>of</strong>essor, National Chung Hsing University,<br />

250 Kuo Kuang Rd., Taichung, Taiwan - ROC,<br />

jfwang@dragon.nchu.edu.tw<br />

In some railway companies, booking limit is used to allocate the number <strong>of</strong> tickets<br />

among multiple legs in a train. Due to the ticket reservation feature <strong>of</strong> “first-comefirst-served”<br />

and the allowance <strong>of</strong> cancellations or no-shows, company revenue and<br />

customer loyalty might be jeopardized. This study examines a railway company’s<br />

online reservation system. When a reservation is made, the company holds it for at<br />

most two days before the reservationist makes the real purchase. The reservation<br />

might turn out to be a cancellation in the end, while during the above period, other<br />

customers might be rejected due to the policy <strong>of</strong> booking limit. In our June, 2010<br />

database, 54% <strong>of</strong> the online reservations are either cancelled or give-up without<br />

notice. This incurs other customers’ unsatisfaction and a customer may take different<br />

strategies to tackle this situation: try again later, try an alternative train, order two or<br />

more sections to compose his/her original target section, and use other transport<br />

mode. In order to consider the above dynamic and nested customer behavior, a<br />

detailed simulation model is constructed according to the information extracted from<br />

the ticket reservation database. We use this model to estimate how much pr<strong>of</strong>it could<br />

have been lost, and how many “loyal” customers are lost due to denied bookings. We<br />

also suggest several strategies to improve revenues and reduce rejections for future<br />

research.<br />

MARKETING SCIENCE CONFERENCE – 2011<br />

70<br />

Saturday, 8:30am - 10:00am<br />

■ SA01<br />

Legends Ballroom I<br />

Conjoint Analysis: Improving the Process<br />

Contributed Session<br />

Chair: Dan Horsky, Simon <strong>Graduate</strong> <strong>School</strong> <strong>of</strong> Business, University <strong>of</strong><br />

Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, United States <strong>of</strong> America,<br />

dan.horsky@simon.rochester.edu<br />

1 - Best-worst Conjoint Analysis as a Remedy for<br />

Lexicographic Choosers<br />

Joseph White, Director, Marketing Sciences, Maritz Research, 1815 S.<br />

Meyers Rd., Suite 600, Oakbrook Terrace, IL, 60181, United States <strong>of</strong><br />

America, joseph.white@maritz.com, Keith Chrzan<br />

Designed choice experiments <strong>of</strong>ten rely on strategies that seek to maximize efficiency<br />

by minimizing level overlap (Huber and Zwernia 1996). In the absence <strong>of</strong> overlapping<br />

levels, however, respondents making lexicographic choices or choices dominated by a<br />

single attribute may provide no information on attributes other than the most<br />

important one (Orme 2009). A large proportion <strong>of</strong> respondents make lexicographic or<br />

dominated choices (Killi, Nossum and Veisten 2007; Kohli and Jedidi 2007; Campbell,<br />

Hutchinson and Scarpa 2006), resulting in poor predictions in highly competitive<br />

holdout choices (Chrzan, Zepp and White 2010). Experimental designs that<br />

incorporate level overlap exist (Sawtooth S<strong>of</strong>tware 2007, Liu and Arora 2010,<br />

Chrzan, Zepp and White 2010). Plausibly, Best-Worst conjoint analysis (Swait,<br />

Louviere and Anderson 1995) as it does not rely on choice sets with or without level<br />

overlap, may provide another type <strong>of</strong> RUM experiment that avoids the problem<br />

lexicographic/dominant choosers pose to minimal overlap choice set designs. In<br />

addition to replicating tests <strong>of</strong> the comparability <strong>of</strong> Best-Worst conjoint analysis and<br />

discrete choice experiments (Swait, Louviere and Anderson 1995, Chrzan and<br />

Skrapits 1996), our presentation reports an experiment that compares the ability <strong>of</strong> a<br />

standard minimum overlap discrete choice experiment and a Best-Worst conjoint<br />

experiment to predict the choices <strong>of</strong> holdout respondents (some portion <strong>of</strong> whom<br />

hopefully make dominated choices).<br />

2 - Using Additional Data Collection and Analysis Steps to Improve the<br />

Validity <strong>of</strong> Online-based Conjoint<br />

Sebastian Selka, Scientific Assistant, Brandenburg University <strong>of</strong><br />

Technology, Erich-Weinert-Strafle 1, Cottbus, 03046, Germany,<br />

sebastian.selka@tu-cottbus.de, Daniel Baier<br />

Conjoint experiments are tending more and more to end up with low internal and<br />

external validity <strong>of</strong> the estimated part-worth function (see, e.g., Green et al. 2001),<br />

because <strong>of</strong> (missing) temporal stability and structural reliability <strong>of</strong> respondents’ partworth<br />

functions (see, McCullogh, Best 1979 or DeSarbo et al. 2005). Also<br />

respondents’ (missing) attentiveness during conjoint experiments is an important<br />

source <strong>of</strong> noisy data and more or less caused by uncontrolled data collection<br />

environments, e.g. many parallel web applications (e.g., social networks, electronic<br />

mail, newspapers or web site browsing, ) during CASI. Here, additional data<br />

collection and analysis steps have been proposed as solution (see, e.g., Netzer et al.<br />

2008 for an overview). Examples <strong>of</strong> internal sources <strong>of</strong> data are response latencies,<br />

eye movements, or mouse movements, examples <strong>of</strong> external sources are sales and<br />

market data. The authors suggest alternative procedures for conjoint data collection<br />

that deal with these potential sources <strong>of</strong> internal and external validity by using<br />

additional calculations and analysis steps. A comparison in an adaptive conjoint<br />

analysis setting shows, that the new procedures lead to a higher internal and external<br />

validity.<br />

3 - Estimation <strong>of</strong> Individual Level Multi-attribute Utility from Ordinal<br />

Paired Preference Comparisons<br />

Dan Horsky, Simon <strong>Graduate</strong> <strong>School</strong> <strong>of</strong> Business, University <strong>of</strong><br />

Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, United States <strong>of</strong> America,<br />

dan.horsky@simon.rochester.edu, Paul Nelson, Sangwoo Shin<br />

Our work suggests that linear programming analysis <strong>of</strong> ordinal paired preference<br />

comparisons (or such comparisons inferred from interval-level ratings) may lead to<br />

better individual utility estimates than alternative methods which use interval-level<br />

ratings data directly. In this paper we: (a) outline a theoretical foundation for<br />

estimating a cardinal scaled utility function from ordinal preference data, in<br />

particular, pairs <strong>of</strong> pairs or ordered paired comparisons; (b) forward linear<br />

programming procedures and their HB versions, designed to estimate individual level<br />

attribute weights from such data; (c) evaluate the statistical properties <strong>of</strong> these<br />

estimators and develop statistical significance tests for them; and (d) evaluate the<br />

ability <strong>of</strong> these estimators to predict hold out sample preferences for two real world<br />

datasets. Simulations show that our ordinal preference-based weight estimates are<br />

more robust to data quality issues than either regression or ordered logit based<br />

estimates. Our real world results also show superior predictive performance. Our<br />

findings indicate that the higher potential for measurement error and scale usage<br />

heterogeneity that resides in cardinal scaled data is an issue. Correspondingly, ordinal<br />

preferences in conjunction with our linear programming estimation methodology<br />

provide individual level attribute weight estimates that are worthy <strong>of</strong> academic and<br />

managerial attention.

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