Browsing by Subject "Service quality"

Marketing researchers have long relied on customer perceptions of service encounters to represent the "true" underlying quality. Researchers and practitioners in healthcare, on the other hand, have long dismissed customer perceptions as a credible measure of service quality. We built a quality framework designed to address this fundamental question: are customer perceptions of service encounters unique, redundant, or wholly flawed measures of actual service quality?

We consistently show customer perspectives reflect a measure of service quality that is both unique from, and complimentary to, the competence with which a service is provided. In fact, we found the explanatory power of either single dimension of process care is completely dependent on the state of the other as they relate to service encounter outcomes. This latter finding may require both management and policy makers to rethink how they approach managing and incenting a balanced approach to investments in improving process care dimensions.

Our research also provides evidence of factors both within, and indirectly outside, the control of management in improving healthcare service quality. In addition, government administrators face a particularly challenging roll in the system; their own policies - whether too punitive or too generous - have the potential to institutionalize lower quality healthcare for the very populations they are most trying to protect.

This dissertation explores how consumers learn from repeated experiences with a product offering. It develops a new Bayesian consumer learning model, the unstable learning model. This model expands on existing models that explore learning when quality is stable, by considering when quality is changing. Further, the dissertation examines situations in which consumers may act as if quality is changing when it is stable or vice versa. This examination proceeds in two essays.

The first essay uses two experiments to examine how consumers learn when product quality is stable or changing. By collecting repeated measures of expectation data and experiences, more information enables estimation to discriminate between stable and unstable learning. The key conclusions are that (1) most consumers act as if quality is unstable, even when it is stable, and (2) consumers respond to the environment they face, adjusting their learning in the correct direction. These conclusions have important implications for the formation and value of brand equity.

Based on the conclusions of this first essay, the second essay develops a choice model of consumer learning when consumers believe quality is changing, even though it is not. A Monte Carlo experiment tests the efficacy of this model versus the standard model. The key conclusion is that both models perform similarly well when the model assumptions match the way consumers actually learn, but with a mismatch the existing model is biased, while the new model continues to perform well. These biases could lead to suboptimal branding decisions.