Consumer cynicism in service failures Tran, Hai‐Anh; Strizhakova, Yuliya; Usrey, Bryan ...
Psychology & marketing,
February 2022, Volume:
39, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Despite growing corporate commitments to being customer‐centric, many customers perceive firms as self‐driven and caring only about their own business interests. This sentiment is projected in ...consumer cynicism, or negative consumer attitudes based on the disbelief in the sincerity of firms' motives and actions. We argue that consumer cynicism emerges in response to negative marketplace situations, such as service and product failures. Across four scenario‐based experiments and one video‐based experiment, our research examines cynicism as a key mediator, transmitting the effect of double deviation (i.e., a failure in delivery and in subsequent recovery) on negative electronic word‐of‐mouth and repurchase intention. We further demonstrate that consumer cynicism can be minimized when the provider uses cocreated recovery (i.e., engages consumers in recovery) even if the recovery fails and when the provider offers a strong empathetic apology (either before or after recovery failure). Our research contributes to consumer and service recovery research by highlighting an important but overlooked role of consumer cynicism in the context of double deviation. We also offer managerial insights into cocreation and empathetic apologies as cost‐effective recovery strategies to minimize cynicism.
Scholarly interest in the experience of dehumanization, the perception that one is being dehumanized, has increased significantly in recent years, yet the construct lacks a validated measurement. The ...purpose of this research is therefore to develop and validate a theoretically grounded experience of dehumanization measurement (EDHM) using item response theory. Evidence from five studies using data collected from participants in the United Kingdom (N = 2082) and Spain (N = 1427), shows that (a) a unidimensional structure replicates and fits well; (b) the measurement demonstrates high precision and reliability across a broad range of the latent trait; (c) the measurement demonstrates evidence for nomological and discriminant validity with constructs in the experience of dehumanization nomological network; (d) the measurement is invariant across gender and cultures; (e) the measurement demonstrates incremental validity in the prediction of important outcomes over and above conceptually overlapping constructs and prior measurements. Overall, our findings suggest the EDHM is a psychometrically sound measurement that can advance research relating to the experience of dehumanization.
Service Overlay Network (SON) is an efficient solution for ensuring the end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) in different real-world applications, including Video-on-Demand, Voice over IP, and other ...value-added Internet-based services. Although SON offers many advantages, such as ease of deployment and resilience to the node failures, it has to face the challenge of overlay network configuration that needs to dynamically adjust to the change in communication requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel method for adaptive overlay topology configuration, called AOTC based on Software-Defined Networks, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. The intuitive motivation is to address the above challenge, maximize the QoS from two aspects of customer preference and network cost. The obtained experimental results demonstrate the superiority of AOTC. Such a method can significantly reduce network cost while providing an improvement of 50% and 60% in terms of average delay and packet loss rate as compared to other traditional approaches.
This paper presents an effective biogeography-based optimization (BBO) for optimal location and sizing of solar photovoltaic distributed generation (PVDG) units to reduce power losses while ...maintaining voltage profile and voltage harmonic distortion at the limits. This applied algorithm was motivated by biogeography, that the study of the distribution of biological species through time and space. This technique is able to expand the searching space and retain good solution group at each generation. Therefore, the applied method can significantly improve performance. The effectiveness of the applied algorithm is validated by testing it on IEEE 33-bus and IEEE 69-bus radial distribution systems. The obtained results are compared with the genetic algorithm (GA), the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) and the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC). As a result, the applied algorithm offers better solution quality and accuracy with faster convergence.
Why do some entrepreneurs pivot their business models in a crisis, while others are more passive? Integrating Conservation of Resources theory with work on crisis rumination, we developed a ...micro-level model to explain why entrepreneurs who are under strain due to a crisis, as indicated by experiencing crisis rumination, adopt an active approach – i.e., using active coping and engaging in pivoting. Moreover, prevention-focused entrepreneurs who are habitually more sensitive to losses are especially stimulated by crisis rumination to pivot to prevent (further) resource losses. We tested our model in an experiment and an eight-month longitudinal study with entrepreneurs during an inflation crisis.
•Crisis rumination–negative repetitive thoughts and anxiety about a crisis–enhances pivoting.•The positive effect of crisis rumination on pivoting is conducted through active coping.•Prevention focus strengthens the association between rumination and pivoting.
In recent years, botnets have become a major threat on the Internet. Most sophisticated bots use Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) to pseudo-randomly generate a large number of domains and select a ...subset in order to communicate with Command and Control (C&C) server. The basic aim is to avoid blacklisting, sinkholing and evade the security systems. Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM) provides a mean to combat this botnet type. It operates on raw domains and is amenable to immediate applications. LSTM is however prone to multiclass imbalance problem, which becomes even more significant in DGA malware detection. This is due the fact that many DGA classes have a very little support in the training dataset. This paper presents a novel LSTM.MI algorithm to combine both binary and multiclass classification models, where the original LSTM is adapted to be cost-sensitive. The cost items are introduced into backpropagation learning procedure to take into account the identification importance among classes. Experiments are carried out on a real-world collected dataset. They demonstrate that LSTM.MI provides an improvement of at least 7% in terms of macro-averaging recall and precision as compared to the original LSTM and other state-of-the-art cost-sensitive methods. It is also able to preserve the high accuracy on non-DGA generated class (0.9849 F1-score), while helping recognize 5 additional bot families.
Service providers’ communication on social media has become a viable method to influence customer purchasing behavior and firm outcomes. Because services are intangible, one of the most pertinent ...challenges is to design text-based social media content to reduce customers’ perceived risk and enhance desired outcomes. According to Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, affective expression can positively influence observer’s reactions. Yet, evidence suggests that affective content (i.e., the use of affective words) is less helpful in high-involvement situations, as customers prefer cognitive information to reduce risk. However, four experiments reveal that high-involvement service providers can enhance customers’ purchase intentions by employing affective content in their online communication. This is because affective content signals effort of the provider, reducing perceived risk, and increasing purchase intentions. Results also demonstrate affective content works better for prevention- (vs. promotion) focused customers and for providers with high-quality reputations, indicating the relative primacy of inferential over affective processes when evaluating affective content. Practically, service providers should carefully rebalance their communication to increase affective content in social media posts.
A content delivery network (CDN) is able to handle high traffic and offer reliable services by geographically bringing the content data to the edge network, where replica servers are installed closer ...to the end users. The traditional CDN architecture lacks a global view of the whole network and, thus, cannot dynamically and optimally perform the server selection task. In this letter, we propose to integrate a software-defined network (SDN) into the CDN architecture. Our intuitive motivation is to decouple the control plane from the forwarding plane in order to offer flexibility and programmability by using the centralized controller. This letter also develops a novel server selection algorithm that is based on the so-called multi-armed bandit problem. Such an algorithm is proved to optimize the server selection function and provide a good experimental result in terms of both average response time and reward score.
Bats are a major reservoir of zoonotic viruses, including coronaviruses. Since the emergence of SARS-CoV in 2002/2003 in Asia, important efforts have been made to describe the diversity of ...Coronaviridae circulating in bats worldwide, leading to the discovery of the precursors of epidemic and pandemic sarbecoviruses in horseshoe bats. We investigated the viral communities infecting horseshoe bats living in Northern Vietnam, and report here the first identification of sarbecoviruses in Rhinolophus thomasi and Rhinolophus siamensis bats. Phylogenetic characterization of seven strains of Vietnamese sarbecoviruses identified at least three clusters of viruses. Recombination and cross-species transmission between bats seemed to constitute major drivers of virus evolution. Vietnamese sarbecoviruses were mainly enteric, therefore constituting a risk of spillover for guano collectors or people visiting caves. To evaluate the zoonotic potential of these viruses, we analyzed in silico and in vitro the ability of their RBDs to bind to mammalian ACE2s and concluded that these viruses are likely restricted to their bat hosts. The workflow applied here to characterize the spillover potential of novel sarbecoviruses is of major interest for each time a new virus is discovered, in order to concentrate surveillance efforts on high-risk interfaces.
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