Realization of the long-term goals of any organization ultimately must revolve around customer satisfaction. This is particularly true in restaurants, where failure to satisfy customers will quickly lead to an early termination of the business. General levels of consumer dissatisfaction with service quality at restaurants are very high -in 1995 over 50 percent of restaurant patrons surveyed cited no aspect of service as being excellent. This finding is consistent with the high levels of failure among restaurants. Given the intense competition and demanding consumers, a reasonable concern revolves around what restaurants can do to maintain customer satisfaction. This paper is focussed on one suggested approach to the problem -the offering of service guarantees. Recently, service guarantees have been offered by an increasing number of industries. These include cable television providers, long distance providers, banking, health care and dental services. We address the issue of the role that service guarantees may fill in demonstrating to potential customers that the restaurant delivers a satisfying dining experience. For example, would a guarantee of satisfaction serve to overcome any doubts of consumers caused by bad dining experiences in the past?There are two basic streams of relevant literature that begin to address the issue of consumer perceptions of service guarantees in restaurants. First are studies of what choice criteria customers use in choosing restaurants. Second are studies of the theoretical role of service guarantees on satisfaction. Restaurant choice criteria studiesA few published studies have been done investigating the key criteria used by customers in choosing restaurants.

New forms of retailing present different pricing challenges. The selling of college textbooks over the Internet represents an ideal case study of the different elements that enter into consumer’s price equation. College students were asked to rate the likelihood of purchase of a text given different profiles of sellers and their offerings. Using conjoint analysis, estimates of consumer tradeoffs were calculated. In‐stock status at the college bookstore was the most important variable, followed by buy‐back policies/guarantees. Price of the text was the third most important variable. Implications for both bookstores and on‐line retailers are presented.

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If 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. AbstractPurpose -Building a customer base as an outcome of customer satisfaction has not been investigated empirically in e-tailing industry. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature. Design/methodology/approach -Explores the relationship between satisfying customers and building a customer base using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Data from the e-retailing industry related to the input variables (e.g. customers' ratings on a set of e-store attributes) and output variables (e.g. a proxy measure of "customer base") are analyzed. Findings -Performance scores for developing a customer base vary across product categories. Performance score is a good parameter for predicting future change on a unique number of visitors and on the competition pattern for a particular e-tailer. Research limitations/implications -Further study can examine other drivers of a developing customer base (e.g. advertising, trust building, and strategic alliance) -thereby producing more robust evidence for customer base development in e-tailing industry. Practical implications -Good practices in the generation of customers and page view have been identified. Knowing the efficiency patterns of an etailer makes it possible to guide managerial action by providing a measure of the extent to which different management actions at the e-tailer can lead to higher future customer growth. Managers should realize that customers match realizations and expectations of product/service performance. Originality/value -This study has identified satisfaction as the important driver of developing a customer base. It focuses on improving diagnosis of the performance of e-tailers by assessing reach efficiency and page view efficiency separately.

With the development of increasingly complex mortgage instruments, the process by which consumers choose among these instruments also increases in importance. The real estate literature does not address how consumers of mortgage instruments make trade-offs among the different instruments. The study controlled for interest rates, and looked at five variables: number of points, additional fees, reputation of lender, type of mortgage (FRM vs. ARM), and term in years of mortgage. Using conjoint analysis it is found that consumers do indeed have different preferences for different mixes of mortgage instruments. It is suggested that mortgage instruments can be tailored to different market segments of borrowers.