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.     

A matter of time? Challenging and hindering effects of time pressure on work engagement

The aim of our research was to test time-exposure effects of time pressure as a stressor typically considered to be a challenge, rather than a hindrance stressor. We examined the within- and between-person effects of time pressure on work engagement in two diary/panel studies with employees using intervals of five days and three weeks, respectively (Study 1, n?=?350, and n?=?357, respectively) and six to eight weeks (Study 2, n?=?238). We assumed that it is a matter of time whether time pressure acts as a challenge (under short-term exposure) or as a hindrance stressor (under long-term exposure). We found significant positive within-person effects of time pressure on work engagement when controlling for strain in the daily and weekly diary assessment (Study 1), but a significant negative within-person effect in the six to eight weeks’ assessment (Study 2). The between-person effects were significant and negative in all studies. Although a short-term increase can be beneficial for a certain time, stable and long-time exposure of time pressure does rather reduce work engagement. Thus, employers should not keep time pressure permanently high to motivate their employees. However, short-term increases of time pressure (e.g. before a deadline) may serve as a motivating factor.     

Consuming colonial imaginaries and forging postcolonial networks: on the road with Indian travellers in the 1950s

Drawing on an extended road trip from England to India undertaken by two Indian travellers in the 1950s, this paper challenges the dominant travel stories and Eurocentric academic accounts that persistently privilege western tourists. Focusing upon the literary desires that shaped their British itinerary and a dramatic encounter in Egypt, we highlight two distinctly different experiences that emerged during their journey. We demonstrate how a swirl of larger historical events and processes marked the time in which they travelled, with the encounters, places and incidents they experienced informed by the dissipation of colonial alliances and the emergence of postcolonial connections.     

Automatic sleep stage classification based on easy to register signals as a validation tool for ergonomic steering in smart bedding systems

Ergonomic sleep studies benefit from long-term monitoring in the home environment to cope with daily variations and habituation effects. Polysomnography allows to asses sleep accurately, but is costly, time-consuming and possibly disturbing for the sleeper. Actigraphy is cheap and user friendly, but for many studies lacks accuracy and detailed information. This proof-of-concept study investigates Least-Squares Support Vector Machines as a tool for automatic sleep stage classification (Wake-N1-Rem to N2-N3 separation), using automatic trainingset-specific filtered features as derived from three easy to register signals, namely heart rate, breathing rate and movement. The algorithms are trained and validated using 20 nights out of a 600 night database from over 100 different healthy persons. Different training and test set strategies were analyzed leading to different results. The more person-specific the training nights to the test nights, the better the classification accuracy as validated against the hypnograms scored by experts from the full polysomnograms. In the limit of complete person-specific training, the accuracy of the algorithm on the test set reached 94%. This means that this algorithm could serve its use in long-term monitoring sleep studies in the home environment, especially when prior person-specific polysomnographic training is performed.     

Self-report to self-control? A note

This note establishes that escalating penalty regimes with the option to self-report crimes may allow present-biased offenders to obligate themselves to refrain from committing future crimes. Self-reporting of a committed crime increases the expected costs of future criminal opportunities, possibly allowing offenders to deter their future selves from seeking immediate gratification.     

The Preliminary Demography of the 2001 Census of India

This note presents and comments on the provisional results of the 2001 census of India. For the first time since Independence in 1947 there is clear evidence that the country's intercensal rate of population growth has fallen significantly—from an average annual rate of 2.14 percent between 1981 and 1991 to a rate of 1.93 percent between 1991 and 2001. At the state level there has been little change in the rates of population growth in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, but there are signs of—often quite considerable—reductions in growth rates for most of the remaining states. The provisional census results suggest that there has been a decline in India's population masculinity compared to 1991. But the note contends that this decline is probably largely spurious because females were less fully enumerated in 1991 than they were in 2001. Indeed the sex ratios of the states of Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, and Gujarat have become noticeably more masculine, which may partly reflect the influence of sex‐selective abortion.