The Economic Payout Model for Service Guarantees

Service guarantees consist of a promise to a customer (marketing), the delivery of a service to the customer (operations), and actions to appease the customer when service failures happen (recovery). A part of recovery involves offering the customer an economic and/or noneconomic payout when things go wrong. When the economic payout is too high or low, the impact on the organization and the customer is usually negative. Therefore, determining the size of the economic payout is of critical strategic and tactical importance in businesses. Yet, no systematic quantitative methods are found in the literature to help managers determine the economic payout for service failures. The current ways an economic payout is determined are management judgment, the consensus of customer focus groups, competitive benchmarking, and the use of simple expected value methods. In this article, we define the Economic Payout Model for Service Guarantees (EPMSG) that provides an optimal service guarantee economic payout under certain conditions. The EPMSG and its objective function considers customer revenue over the short‐ and long‐term, the cost of creating and providing the service, the cost of recovery, the probability of a service failure, and the probability of customer retention as a function of economic payout. A numerical example is provided of how EPMSG works. Customer retention probability distributions are examined assuming normal and gamma distributions. We end the article by describing the theoretical contributions, model limitations, managerial implications, and opportunities for future research.     

Women's provisioning work: counting the cost for women living on low income

This paper reports on a research project that uses the concept of provisioning as a starting place in understanding the activities women in marginalized communities undertake to provide for themselves and members of their households and neighborhoods. This project explores the household and collective provisioning undertaken by women who are all part of formal community organizations in Canada. The work women do is explored from the dimension of women's relationships of responsibility. This vantage point uncovers a complex web of activity including paid employment, voluntary work, care work, exchanges of goods and services, community work, and self-provisioning. In addition, the provisioning strategies that women use when public resources are scarce are explored. In the face of significant cutbacks in public provision of goods and services, women are engaging in a complex network of activities in order to compensate through private provisioning for resources that are no longer available through public provisioning. The policy context in which these strategies are pursued is explored as well as the way in which risky policies produce risky coping strategies.     

Exploring Contrasting Formulations of Expectancy Theory*

The explanatory potential of four forms of expectancy theory with additive and multiplicative expectancy terms and linear and nonlinear valence functions were contrasted. A behavioral decision-making theory approach was used when 101 subjects were asked to make 128 hypothetical job-choice decisions. More than 25,800 decisions under a within-subjects framework were analyzed. Results indicate that the majority (83 percent) of subjects employed additive or multiplicative expectancy models with linear valence functions. However, the predictive efficacy of the expectancy theory model was improved for 17 percent of the subjects when nonlinear valence terms were introduced. The findings imply that different functional forms of expectancy theory may be needed to model individuals' decision-making processes.     

Issue definition in rights‐based policy focused on the experiences of individuals with disabilities: an examination of Canadian parliamentary discourse

In issue definition in rights‐based policy Canada stereotypically embraces a more positive, human rights‐centered approach as compared with the American stereotype associated with the USA’s more presumptively negative, civil rights‐based tack. Since exclusionary infrastructures violate the core values of democratic governance, a failure to address unnecessarily exclusive infrastructures presents a rights‐based public challenge surrounding disability akin to those experienced by other non‐elite groups. Analysis of disability policy serves to clarify positive versus negative tendencies in rights‐based policy, including whether the expectation of a primarily positive basis in Canada is confirmed. This article examines the definition of public dimensions of the experiences of individuals with autism as a case reflecting the basis of construction of rights in Canada.     

Professionalization of evaluative research: Conflict as a sign of health

Morell and Flaherty (1978) present arguments about the current status of evaluative research as a profession. This paper contains a critique, using a process model of professional development, of the perspectives employed by Morell and Flaherty. Issues discussed are the nature and substance of conflicts in evaluative research, including conflicts over methodological perspectives, the role of the evaluator in program planning, and the appropriate uses and users of evaluative information. The paper concludes with a discussion of the needs within the profession of evaluative research if it is to remain viable and responsive to change.     

Urbanization and warming of Phoenix (Arizona,USA): Impacts,feedbacks and mitigation

This paper examines the impacts, feedbacks, and mitigation of the urban heat island in Phoenix, Arizona (USA). At Sky Harbor Airport, urbanization has increased the nighttime minimum temperature by 5°C and the average daily temperatures by 3.1°C. Urban warming has increased the number of misery hours per day for humans, which may have important social consequences. Other impacts include (1) increased energy consumption for heating and cooling of buildings, (2) increased heat stress (but decreased cold stress) for plants, (3) reduced quality of cotton fiber and reduced dairy production on the urban fringe, and (4) a broadening of the seasonal thermal window for arthropods. Climate feedback loops associated with evapotranspiration, energy production and consumption associated with increased air conditioning demand, and land conversion are discussed. Urban planning and design policy could be redesigned to mitigate urban warming, and several cities in the region are incorporating concerns regarding urban warming into planning codes and practices. The issue is timely and important, because most of the world's human population growth over the next 30 years will occur in cities in warm climates.     

An evaluation of analysis options for the one-group-per-condition design. Can any of the alternatives overcome the problems inherent in this design?

This article addresses the analytic problems associated with a design in which one identifiable group is allocated to each treatment condition and members of those groups are measured to assess the intervention. Such designs are often called quasi-experiments if the groups are not randomized to conditions and group-randomized trials if the groups are randomized. They present special problems, and previous reports have argued against their use in efficacy or effectiveness trials. Even so, this design still appears with surprising frequency. This article presents the results from a new simulation study that underscores the analytic problems associated with this design.     

Characteristics of responding-, nonresponding- and refusing-parents in an adolescent lifestyle choice study.

The acquisition of a random sample is one of the many methodological problems that arise when conducting research with adolescent populations. Frequently, due to ethical considerations associated with collecting data from adolescents, active parental consent procedures are required. The current study examined characteristics of parents who consented, refused consent, or did not respond to an active consent request for their children to participate in a large-scale study of adolescent lifestyle behaviors. Results indicated nonresponding-parents were more likely to be employed than consenting-parents. Further, differences were found for a number of attitudinal variables and about the importance of adolescent research. There were significant differences between refusing-parents, and consenting- and nonresponding-parents who were similar in their attitudes toward adolescent research. The findings suggest that nonresponding-parents are characteristically more similar to consenting-parents than to refusing-parents, which supports the use of passive consent procedures as a reasonable alternative to requiring active parental consent in adolescent research.     

Gastrostomy and children: a review of the literature in learning disabilities

Children with developmental delays often suffer feeding difficulties. It has become common for those with a severe likelihood of malnutrition to be considered for alternative methods of nutritional intake, often a gastrostomy. As part of a pilot study investigating the effects of gastrostomy on the child and their family, we conducted a literature review in order to establish the current areas of research, progress and concern. This paper describes the method and findings of the literature review and concludes with a discussion of the topics raised. The main conclusion is that although the need for gastrostomy in this group of children has been shown to be effective in maintaining adequate weight gain and nutritional intake, the support given to the family prior to, and after the operation is inadequate. Greater emphasis needs to be placed on detailed family assessment as part of the early intervention package. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Homosexuality and heterosexism: views from academics in the helping professions

Summary This study describes and analyses attitudes towards homosexualityamong faculty in departments of three helping professions: socialwork, psychology and education. The sample consists of 235 facultymembers in the five main universities in Israel. Out of 849questionnaires that were sent to all faculty members of therelevant departments of social work, psychology and education,103 were completed and returned from social work, 56 from psychologyand 76 from education, representing a 27.7 per cent total responserate. The instrument used was the Index of Homophobia (IHP)(Hudson and Ricketts, 1980) in addition to professional backgroundand demographic information. Findings show that, overall, membersof academic departments of the helping professions present 'low-gradehomophobic' attitudes (Hudson and Ricketts, 1980). Statisticallysignificant differences surfaced among the three departments,with faculty members in schools of education emerging as mosthomophobic, followed by social work and psychology. Severalexplanations are put forward in an attempt to account for suchdifferences, including the theoretical framework of marginality,the variables traditionally associated with homophobia, andprofessional training.