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This study aims to examine the relationship between family business identity disclosure by firms and consumer product evaluations and the moderating impact, if any, of firm size on this relationship. Toward this end, the study seeks to develop a theoretical explanation for how consumers process family business identity information.

A qualitative pre-study was conducted to obtain preliminary evidence that consumers’ perceptions of family businesses originate from both family- and business-based category beliefs. A product evaluation experiment, involving young adult subjects, was used to test the research hypotheses, and the experiment data were analyzed using MANOVA.

The key finding was that the effect of family business identity disclosure on consumer product evaluations is moderated by firm size.

This research has implications for businesses seeking to promote their family business identity in branding communications.

This research provides a theoretical account of why consumers might hold different perceptions of family business brands. The interactive effect of firm size and family business identity information disclosure on consumer product evaluations contributes new insight to family business branding.

Comfort foods consumption and linkages to stress coping strategies have received little attention in the business research on food products and services. This paper aims to explore comfort foods consumption among older Americans and how stress-coping strategies are related to their consumption frequency and variety of comfort foods.

Older Americans aged 50–99 years (N = 1,428) in the Health and Retirement Study were surveyed on their frequency and variety of comfort foods consumption and their consumption coping strategies. Data were analyzed and regression models were estimated.

Demographically, baby boomer, male, and non-Hispanic whites reported higher frequency and variety of comfort foods consumption. Comfort foods consumption in frequency and variety was significantly higher (lower) when “eat more” (“use alcohol”) was the endorsed coping strategy.

Research findings furthered research on the consumption of comfort foods among older American adults and added new insights into their coping behavior, both of which may help businesses be more targeted in serving comfort foods to the mature market and the public sector to tailor their services to older adults.

Electronic communication technology can facilitate communications with family, friends and health-care professionals and deliver products and services that can significantly raise quality of life for the aging population. However, technology use by older Americans lags behind that of younger Americans. This paper aims to explore physiological decline and cognitive decline as underlying causes or antecedents that may uniquely contribute to predicting perceived ease of use (PEOU) and actual use of technology over and beyond chronological age among older adults.

Data were collected by University of Michigan’s 2012 Health and Retirement Study from a national sample of 1,686 respondents age 50 or older. Data were analyzed with the Mplus software package. The conceptual framework was estimated with a path analysis model.

Results indicated that physiological decline (vision, hearing and health) and cognitive decline (memory) made a significant unique contribution to predicting PEOU and actual use of technology above and beyond chronological age. Implications for marketing technology-based products and services to older Americans were discussed.

This research has identified and empirically tested how variability in physiological decline and cognitive decline could uniquely predict use of communication technologies, directly and indirectly via PEOU, above and beyond chronological age.

The purpose of this paper is an exploratory study of customers’ “lived” experiences of commercial recommendation services to better understand customer expectations for personalization with recommendation agents. Recommendation agents programmed to “learn” customer preferences and make personalized recommendations of products and services are considered a useful tool for targeting customers individually. Some leading service firms have developed proprietary recommender systems in the hope that personalized recommendations could engage customers, increase satisfaction and sharpen their competitive edge. However, personalized recommendations do not always deliver customer satisfaction. More often, they lead to dissatisfaction, annoyance or irritation.

The critical incident technique is used to analyze customer satisfactory or dissatisfactory incidents collected from online group discussion participants and bloggers to develop a classification scheme.

A classification scheme with 15 categories is developed, each illustrated with satisfactory incidents and dissatisfactory incidents, defined in terms of an underlying customer expectation, typical instances of satisfaction and dissatisfaction and, when possible, conditions under which customers are likely to have such an expectation. Three pairs of themes emerged from the classification scheme. Six tentative research propositions were introduced.

Findings from this exploratory research should be regarded as preliminary. Besides, content validity of the categories and generalizability of the findings should be subject to future research.

Research findings have implications for identifying priorities in developing algorithms and for managing personalization more strategically.

This research explores response to personalization from a customer’s perspective.

Despite the strong intuitive appeal of personalization (through employees or, increasingly, through the use of software applications), relatively little is known about its role in managing service relationships. This study aims to explore the burgeoning area of technology‐mediated personalization and its effects on customer commitment to service relationships.

A theoretical perspective based on integrated reviews of service research and relationship marketing is developed and used to guide the exploration of personalization effects with qualitative data.

Personalization is not always good enhancement to service: its effects have contingencies and vary across the categories. Continuity personalization seems to be a promising area for researchers and practitioners.

Personalization effects should be rigorously studied. Continuity personalization seems to offer a promising area for future research.

The intuitive belief about personalization is probably misleading. Whether or not personalization strategies help service relationships depends on their capacity to generate positive inferences on dimensions of performance, benevolence, and value provision. Out of the three types, continuity personalization offers a promising strategic option for managing ongoing customer relationships if well implemented.

The counter‐intuitive insights into personalization effects on relationship continuity address issues of theoretical and practical concerns.

Although extensive research has been conducted on precast production, irregular component loading constraints have received little attention, resulting in limitations for transportation cost optimization. Traditional irregular component loading methods are based on past performance, which frequently wastes vehicle space. Additionally, real-time road conditions, precast component assembly times, and delivery vehicle waiting times due to equipment constraints at the construction site affect transportation time and overall transportation costs. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an optimization model for Just-In-Time (JIT) delivery of precast components considering 3D loading constraints, real-time road conditions and assembly time.

In order to propose a JIT (just-in-time) delivery optimization model, the effects of the sizes of irregular precast components, the assembly time, and the loading methods are considered in the 3D loading constraint model. In addition, for JIT delivery, incorporating real-time road conditions in the transportation process is essential to mitigate delays in the delivery of precast components. The 3D precast component loading problem is solved by using a hybrid genetic algorithm which mixes the genetic algorithm and the simulated annealing algorithm.

A real case study was used to validate the JIT delivery optimization model. The results indicated this study contributes to the optimization of strategies for loading irregular precast components and the reduction of transportation costs by 5.38%.

This study establishes a JIT delivery optimization model with the aim of reducing transportation costs by considering 3D loading constraints, real-time road conditions and assembly time. The irregular precast component is simplified into 3D bounding box and loaded with three-space division heuristic packing algorithm. In addition, the hybrid algorithm mixing the genetic algorithm and the simulated annealing algorithm is to solve the 3D container loading problem, which provides both global search capability and the ability to perform local searching. The JIT delivery optimization model can provide decision-makers with a more comprehensive and economical strategy for loading and transporting irregular precast components.

The purpose of this paper is to study the evolution of Chinese industrial relations after the market reform of 1978, while basing its arguments and conclusion on analysis of the interactions of key actors in the labour arena in China. The significant phenomena in the evolution of industrial relations are the coming of transnational capital and the emergence of self‐organising protests by migrant workers.

The paper uses a case study approach.

The Labour Contract Law and the local political economy experience strong effects from TNCs and other business players. Meanwhile, globalisation has introduced the civil society movement to China, which has given rise to an increasing number of NGOs working for labour rights. Tight financial and technical connections between grassroots NGOs and international donor organisations make it possible for bottom‐up labour activities to counteract the unilateral influence of the state and market over the Chinese workforce. Since the ACFTU, the official trade union umbrella, has many institutional constraints to undertake a thorough transition towards labour in the near future, workers' representation is diversified.

One implication for further theoretical studies is that tripartism cannot fully disclose the reality of Chinese labour, and that labour representation derives from both unions and self‐organisation of workers, such as NGOs, which opens more room for the entrenchment of the grassroots labour movement to sustain the balance of power among the state, ACFTU, firms, international market forces and individual workers in the long term.