OM Forum—The Service and Information Economy: Research Opportunities

Abstract

T he U.S. economy is already dominated by service and information-intensive industries in terms of both gross national product and jobs, and these trends are visible in all major world economies. These economic shifts are driven by productivity changes, which today often depend on new information and communication technologies. These changes can be thought of as service industrialization, which underlies productivity improvements. Industrialization is, in turn, closely related to the design and operation of service processes at the level of firms and sectors. Some of the implications for process economics, operations strategy, and process management are outlined, and the opportunities for research in operations and technology management related to these trends are discussed.

Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety through Access to Human Contact

“…Facets of the consumer loan application process engender anxiety -for example, the pulling of a customer's credit report may stimulate anxieties associated with being evaluated (Zeidner and Matthews 2005) and uncertainty while waiting for potentially negative news -such as being denied for a loan -may produce more anxiety than facing the decision (Sweeny and Falkenstein 2015). Consistent with prior research (Karmarkar andPitbladdo 1995, Roels 2014), we view the investment planning and consumer loan application processes to be forms of co-production, since key contributions need to be made by both the firm and the customer for the service to be delivered and for each to realize value from the interaction. In co-productive self-service interactions, we hypothesize that anxiety may undermine choice satisfaction, and in turn, trust in the firm and subsequent levels of engagement.…”

“…We focus our empirical investigation on customer interactions with financial services, an important sector of the U.S. economy with a long history of SST deployment that has attracted scholarly attention (Hatzakis et al 2010, Yang andChing 2014). Online investing, for example, is an area of financial services recognized as co-productive (Karmarkar andPitbladdo 1995, Roels 2014), that consists of complex tasks and system design challenges due to capital market uncertainties (Kaufmann et al 2013, Looney andHardin 2009) that may lead to higher incidence of stress and anxiety (Engelberg and Parsons 2016), and has provided context for prior study of decision-making satisfaction and trust formation in the absence of human interaction (Balasubramanian et al 2003). We use both online investing and loan procurement scenarios as empirical settings for our studies.…”

“…The dissatisfaction that customers feel with their own decision-making under anxietyregardless of decision quality ) -is often unexpressed, yet service providers may be penalized for the effects of anxieties that stem from factors that are outside of the firm's control. Although we are not the first to identify anxiety as an influencing factor in customer attitudes toward SSTs (Dabholkar andBagozzi 2002, Meuter et al 2003), we add to the nascent study of the role of emotions in operations (Ding et al 2010, Karmarkar 2015, Urda and Loch 2013 by exploring how the effects of customer anxiety on decision-making spillover to affect service relationships. We find that the anxiety customers feel can undermine their choice satisfaction during self-service interactions, which in turn reduces their level of trust in the service provider.…”

OM Forum—Making OM Research More Relevant: “Why?” and “How?”

“…For recent discussions about different OM research topics, the reader is referred to de Kok and Graves (2003) and Singhal (2012) for supply chain management, Green (2012) for healthcare delivery operations, Drake and Spinler (2013) for sustainable operations, SimchiLevi (2014) for data-driven OM research, Netessine (2014) for innovative business models, Karmarkar (2015) for service operations, Starr and Van Wassenhove (2014) for humanitarian operations and crisis management, and Sodhi and Tang (2014b) for socially responsible operations. Also, for recent discussions about different OM research methods, the reader is referred to an excellent series of Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science published by Elsevier for various operations research/ management science (OR/MS) analytical methods (discrete optimization, stochastic programming, etc.…”

OM Forum—Three Simple Approaches for Young Scholars to Identify Relevant and Novel Research Topics in Operations Management

“…As manufacturing firms changed from "vertically integrated" to "globally decentralized" in the 1990s, many OM researchers examined various planning and contracting issues arising from decentralized supply chains (Tayur et al 1998, Simchi-Levi et al 2004, Lariviere 2016. Since 2000, many OM researchers investigated various OM issues arising from service operations (Maglio et al 2010, Karmarkar 2015, healthcare operations (Brandeau et al 2004, Green 2012, revenue management (Gallego andvan Ryzin 1994, Bitran andCaldentey 2003), innovations (Girotra and Netessine 2014), marketing and operations interfaces (Ho and Tang 2004), finance and operations interfaces (Birge et al 2007, Babich andKouvelis 2015), and human resource management and operations interfaces (Boudreau et al 2003). More recently, there are new research trends in OM research exploring issues arising from emerging markets (Iyer et al 2013), humanitarian operations (Starr and van Wassenhove 2014), supply chain risk management (Sodhi et al 2012), sustainability (Tang and Zhou 2012, Drake and Spinler 2013, Girotra and Netessine 2013, and the sharing economy (Cachon et al 2017, Taylor 2016.…”