Quality, value, satisfaction, trust, a

Finally, the three judges worked as a team to evaluate 17 decision areas in each of the
three stages. A seven-level evaluation system was used ranging from:
• !!! for a remarkably effective decision/event
• ??? for a disastrous decision/event.
Because the evaluation assignments were made knowing the outcomes of the decisions and
events, the assignments were made with few disagreements among the judges; disagreements
were settled by discussion and consensus. Having the judges make evaluation assignments
individually and testing for interceder reliability would be an improvement on this method.
The Millie Case
The "Millie's Hand Cooked Potato Chips" case is an undisguised thick description of
entrepreneur behavior covering a five-year period, 1984 through 1988. Brian Shore was the
entrepreneur who founded the company in 1984. Sales of the Millie hatched cooked chips
(versus continuous cooked chips offered by larger competitors) increased from $500,000 to $3
million during the brief life of the firm.
Limitations. Causal mapping approaches of retailing entrepreneur case studies are
limited in several ways. For research on entrepreneur behavior, additional work on inter coder
reliability is needed to confirm the consistency of both creating concepts and coding linkages in
such maps. Also, the accuracy of most published thick descriptions of real-life entrepreneur
cases is questionable. The use of multiple research methods and the checking of facts by using
multiple sources, and the re-checking of mental thoughts is not often described in such cases;
thus, no evidence is provided in most of these cases on concurrent validity.
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