Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:Norizan Kassim, Nor Asiah Abdullah, (2010),"The effect of perceived service quality dimensions on customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty in e-commerce settings: A cross cultural analysis", Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Vol. For AuthorsIf you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. KeywordsCustomer services quality, Customer loyalty, Trust, Electronic commerce, Customer satisfaction AbstractIn e-commerce, loyal customers are considered extremely valuable. Loyalty is generally attributed to satisfaction with the quality of service. Since online transactions involve many uncertainties for the customer, trust is a condition for exchange. Trust in the electronic medium -here called "e-trust" -is believed to increase online customer loyalty, but empirical confirmations are scarce. The present study empirically investigates the roles of service quality, satisfaction and trust in an e-commerce context. In the study, e-trust is found to directly affect loyalty. The e-service quality dimension of assurance, i.e. trusting the merchant, influences loyalty via e-trust and e-satisfaction. Other e-quality dimensions, such as ease of use, e-scape, responsiveness, and customization influence e-loyalty mainly indirectly, via satisfaction. Managerial implications and suggestions for further research are provided.

a b s t r a c tIn today's global economy, an ever-increasing number of companies are dealing with international partners, instigating a need to understand the impact of cultural differences on business interactions. Using Hall's distinction of high-and low-context culture, this study investigates the direct and moderating effects of cultural differences in dyadic buyer-supplier negotiations. Theory is developed regarding the impact of culture on joint profits, juxtaposing Transaction Cost Economics and the Relational View. The theory is tested with a negotiation experiment. Participants, classified by their country of origin, negotiate prices and quality levels for three products. This study finds that cultural differences within the negotiation dyad reduce joint profits when compared to dyads of participants with similar cultural backgrounds. Cultural differences also moderate the impact of trust and bargaining strategy on joint profits. Overall, this study concludes that cultural differences, as encountered in day-to-day business interactions in global supply chains, significantly impact negotiation outcomes.

In this study, we investigate the impact of national culture on the effectiveness of bonus and penalty incentive contracts in supply chain exchanges. We conducted laboratory experiments in Canada, China, and South Korea, involving transactional exchanges in which suppliers were presented with either bonus or penalty contracts. Then we compared suppliers' contract acceptance, level of effort, and shirking across national cultures. Our findings reveal critical cultural influences on contract effectiveness. We show that although acceptance of bonus contracts is comparable across cultures, suppliers from Canada, a national culture considered low in power distance and high in humane orientation, exhibit lower acceptance rates of penalty contracts. In addition, we find evidence that suppliers associated with collectivist cultures exert more effort and shirk less in bonus contracts but these relationships also are more complex. When we compare contract effectiveness across bonus and penalty contracts within a given cultural setting, we find in all three countries greater acceptance of bonus contracts than penalty contracts. Also, after contracts are accepted, bonus contracts are more successful in China because suppliers exert greater effort and shirk less under bonus contracts than penalty contracts. However, in Canada and South Korea, the results of accepted contracts for both penalty and bonus contracts are nearly indistinguishable.

Original equipment manufacturers increasingly involve suppliers in new product development (NPD) projects. How companies design a contract to motivate supplier participation is an important but under‐examined empirical question. Analytical studies have started to examine the optimal contract that aligns buyer‐supplier incentives in joint NPD projects, but empirical evidence is scarce about the actual contracts offered by buying companies. Bridging the analytical and empirical literature, this paper compares optimal contracting derived from a parsimonious analytical model with actual behaviors observed in an experiment. In particular, we focus on how project uncertainty, buying company effort share, and buyer risk aversion influence three contractual decisions: total investment level, revenue share and fixed fee. Our results indicate significant differences between the optimal and actual behaviors. We identify various types of non‐optimal contractual behaviors, which we explain from a risk aversion as well as a bounded rationality perspective. Overall, our findings contribute to the literature by showing that (1) the actual contractual behaviors could differ significantly from the optimal ones, (2) the actual contract design is sensitive to changes in project uncertainty and buying company effort share, and (3) the significant roles of risk aversion and bounded rationality in explaining the non‐optimal contractual behaviors.

PurposeIn retail settings, customer satisfaction is generally associated with a global evaluation of the store, i.e. the store image. Waiting for service is not part of the store image dimensions, but it does play an increasingly important role in the retail experience where waits are often inevitable. The present study seeeks to investigate how waiting for service at the checkout counter influences overall satisfaction, along with the store image.Design/methodology/approachThe study combines services marketing and waiting literature. Data were collected in various supermarkets in The Netherlands. A partial least squares regression technique is used to analyze the data.FindingsThe paper demonstrates an important and complementary role of the behavioural construct “negative response to the wait” in explaining overall customer satisfaction in a retail environment. The effect of customers' negative emotional response to the wait on satisfaction is partially mediated by store image, and explained variance in the dependent variable increases by 24 percent when the effect of the wait at the checkout is included.Research limitations/implicationsMeasuring customer satisfaction without taking into account the effects of various waits during the retail experience will produce incomplete results.Practical implicationsMoreover, a range of controllable factors influences the customer's wait. Intelligently managing these factors can mitigate negative effects on customer satisfaction, or even increase the overall evaluation of the service. Specific recommendations for service managers and a research agenda are provided.Originality/valueThe study combines service marketing and waiting literature to address the issue of waiting in line and tests the theory with real‐world data from a field study.