The effect of stress on customer perception of the frontline employee: an experimental study

Review of Managerial Science - This article examines positive effects of customer stress drawn upon the theory of excitation transfer. Contrary to previous marketing and management literature, the...     

Reference compensation: a transfer of reference price theory to human resource management

The topics of compensation in human resource management and pricing in marketing theory both involve a monetary component that is important for companies to manage. While the role that price perceptions play for consumers is the subject of the well-established reference price theory, human resource management theory lacks any related concept for the compensation perceptions held by employees. This paper transfers reference price theory to HR management in the form of reference compensation, conceptualized as an individual’s compensation norm, including normative and predictive compensation expectations. Possible measures to influence employees’ reference compensation are suggested and avenues for further establishing the concepts in research and practice are developed. As a first empirical attempt to support the relevance of the concept, we present results of an exploratory study among 88 part-time students. We show that employees apply references when judging compensation, and that the applied references vary with different employment situations.     

How customer satisfaction with respect to price and quality affects customer retention: an integrated approach considering nonlinear effects

There is consensus in the marketing literature that satisfaction of customers concerning the perceived quality and pricing of products or services is critical for customer retention. In contrast, there is lack of empirical evidence about the exact functional relationship. Using parametric and nonparametric regression, this contribution empirically investigates whether and to what extent nonlinear effects of and interaction effects between both satisfaction dimensions affect customer retention. The empirical results do not only reveal complex nonlinear effects for those satisfaction-retention relationships, respectively, but also indicate strong interaction effects of both satisfaction dimensions on customer retention. Furthermore, nonparametric approaches prove to be more flexible than parametric approaches to model complex interactions.