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Unfamiliarity with foreign business environments and cultures will result in higher levels of uncertainty, especially for international service organizations. To effectively deal with international uncertainty, it seems crucial to have access to information that is as complete as possible. In practice, however, information is hardly ever complete. To date, little is known about the impact of incomplete information on the decision-making processes in international service firms. This article examines the effects of incomplete information on the evaluation and use of marketing research intelligence. The results of an experimental study suggest that decision makers in international service firms are unlikely to ignore missing information. Instead, they tend to adopt a strategy of inferential, assumption-based reasoning. Furthermore, the absence of information relevant to decision making in international services marketing has distinct evaluative consequences in terms of satisfaction, trust, and intention to use information.

It is commonly acknowledged that service quality can be measured by using attributebased and incident-based measurements. Both methods are distinct in nature, but can be used complementarily. However, in the literature a simultaneous empirical investigation of the power of critical incidents in relation to attribute scores is lacking. In this paper we merge both methods for assessing service quality in a professional services context. Subsequently, both measurements have been used to investigate the effect of service quality on short-term customer satisfaction and longterm trust in the service provider. Results indicate that the combined approach adds value to singlemethod measurement for explaining customer satisfaction. Furthermore, negative incidents are more influential on satisfaction than positive experiences. However, the negative effect of a negative incident on satisfaction can be compensated for by paying attention to particular dimensions of service quality. Critical incidents do not seem to have an impact on the apparently stable construct of trust.

In high-technology industrial markets, a shift can be observed from the mere delivery of industrial products to a total-productoffering, including both products and accompanying services. Because of the heterogeneity in buyers' demands, the measurement of an organization's performance on such total-product-of-24 ferings becomes quite difficult. This problem gets even more serious when one is trying to compare the relative performance of international subsidiaries, since factors such as cultural differences and their influence on how customers report on performance have to be taken into account. This article attempts to conceptualize cultural differences and uses these for establishing international equivalence in customer survey data on the performance on a high-tech total-product-offering. The results of an empirical study reveal that cultural differences indeed influence international performance measurement. After correction for these differences, conclusions can be drawn on the relative performance of different subsidiaries. Furthermore, it is shown that intangible service elements in a high-tech total-product-offering have the strongest influence on customer satisfaction. . His current research interests include the management of service organizations, services marketing, quantitative methods in marketing, and marketing channels.