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This study aims to explore consumers’ motivations in the adoption of either print or digital forms of media, given the fluctuation of trends and attitudes in magazine consumption in the USA. This paper utilizes cognitive lock-in and the power law of practice to further the understanding of digital adoption through an interdisciplinary lens.

In this study, initially, five focus group sessions, including 53 qualifying non-student participants randomly placed into groups of 10 or 11, were held. Next, a 2 × 2 between-subjects quasi-experiment, using 163 undergraduate students at a large public university, was conducted.

The findings show that although the digital medium is considered less expensive, more convenient and more environmentally friendly, the print medium is regarded as more familiar, personal and visual. Further, whether the media type is a book or a magazine, consumers report higher perceived value, hedonic value and attitude toward print versus digital media.

The potential to digitally attract and lock-in consumers in the media industry has immense implications. Individuals consume media because of fashion marketing, personal space and advertisements, among other reasons.

This paper contributes to existing research by uncovering qualitative and quantitative insights into media consumption through a multilayered analysis of focus group participants and a quantitative experiment. The findings indicate that both the power law of practice theory and cognitive lock-in are plausible explanations for the choice of print over digital media format.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons why customers often cannot or do not exit a negative service encounter (lock-in) and to discuss how this affects their well-being and coping responses. This contributes to the research on how negative service encounters emerge and evolve and how such encounters impact customer well-being and subsequent responses.

An inductive, exploratory approach was used. Interviews with 20 service customers yielded over 90 detailed lock-in experiences across 25 different services. A multi-step, iterative coding process was used with a mixture of coding techniques that stem from a grounded theory approach.

Four categories of factors that caused customers to endure a negative event were identified (physical lock-in, dependency on the service, social lock-in and psychological lock-in). Customers either experienced inner turmoil (if they perceived having the option to stay or leave) or felt captive; both impacted their well-being and coping strategies in different ways. Three characteristics of negative events that caused lock-in to persist over time were identified.

This is a qualitative study that aims to identify factors behind customer lock-in, reduced well-being and coping strategies across different types of service encounters. Future research may build on these themes to investigate lock-in during specific service encounters in greater depth.

This research provides insights regarding how service providers can anticipate lock-in situations. In addition, the findings point to several ways in which frontline employees can assist customers with the coping process, during lock-in.

Customer lock-in during a service encounter is a common, yet unexplored phenomenon. This research contributes to a better understanding of why customers endure negative events and how such perceptions are reflected in their experiences and behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the switching behavior of mobile service customers in the USA with a focus on service quality, innovation and lock-in strategies as deterrents of switching.

A thorough literature review coupled with two focus group interviews provided the impetus for the design and development of a survey instrument that was then administered to graduate and undergraduate students in the Southeast USA.

The paper finds that: mobile service quality (m-SERVQUAL) is a significant detractor of switching intentions of customers – if customers perceive their provider to be innovative, they are less likely to switch to another provider; the perception of being innovative is equally as important as the perception of the service quality delivered by the provider; hard lock-in (unreasonable contract length) leads customers to increase their intention to switch, which is completely counter to its intended purpose; and service quality perceptions and perceptions of the innovativeness of the company positively impact consumers ' intent to buy more add-on services.

Delivering high service quality as well as being perceived as an innovator are key determinants in reducing consumer switching. Each has a unique role to play, but understanding the impact of the interplay between them is critical. Important innovation factors for providers include creating new services, especially data services, and working with hardware manufacturers to provide new phone models more frequently. Lastly, hard lock-in (e.g. long contracts, contract breaking fees, etc.) may backfire with a higher reported propensity to switch in the long run.

The study draws attention to the importance of innovation in retaining customers. Counter to the literature, it also finds that hard lock-ins may be detrimental in the long run and a practice to be avoided.

The attempt to establish a common European framework for core platforms' duties and responsibilities toward other actors in the digital environment is at the core of the recent scholarly debate surrounding the Digital Markets Act (DMA) proposal. In particular, the everlasting juxtaposition between the “data power” – as emerging from recent cases (Section 2) – that dominant tech companies enjoy and the concept of consumer sovereignty (Section 3) lies at the core of the proposal's attempt to identify digital core platforms as market gatekeepers. Accordingly, this chapter critically investigates the divide between power imbalance and consumer sovereignty in light of the architecture designed by the DMA, with a specific focus on its effectiveness in identifying gatekeepers' power drivers (Section 4). After highlighting the main critical aspects of the pertinent rules, opportunities for fruitful developments are then identified through the reframing of some of the notions considered in the proposal, and namely the role of “lock-in” effects and “data accumulation” (Section 5). Lastly, this chapter suggests that the DMA advancements – while desirable – are bound to be fragmentary in the absence of a wider appraisal of the nature of data power imbalance dynamics in the modern digital markets (Section 6).

Digitalization has transformed several industries during the past two decades. In this paper the authors focus on the retail sector, where new business models help retailers and suppliers meet the ever changing and demanding needs of retail shoppers. One example of this business model innovation is multi-sided digital platforms, which have become popular as they connect consumers with suppliers from around the world with a large ecosystem to support the retail platform. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how multi-sided digital platforms are transforming the retail exchange logic and assess the implications and impact of these platform-based businesses on the retail sector, especially for business managers and consumers.

In this paper, the authors employ literature review, conceptual analysis and qualitative case study methodology. The authors provide an overview of how the platform economy is affecting the retail sector through the illustration of four digital multi-sided platforms: Alibaba Group, Amazon.com, eBay and Rakuten Group, and what differentiates them from incumbent business models in retailing.

The findings suggest that platforms transform the transaction logic of retailing as they simply intermediate transactions between buyers and suppliers rather than handling the entire supply and logistics chain themselves. The authors highlight the role of consumer understanding and Big Data as one example of how multi-sided digital platforms differentiate from their non-platform competitors.

The paper highlights how incumbent retailers can compete against new forms of business, such as digital platforms, and the authors demonstrate some of the managerial capabilities needed to remain relevant amidst this new digital competition.

Very little empirical studies in marketing and retail literature have focused on multi-sided digital platforms and their business models. The present study fills this gap with an overview of how multi-sided digital platforms transform the retail sector.

In many industries, customers are offered the opportunity to revise their initial decision in return for a superior but more expensive service option, a selling technique that is typically referred to as upselling. Drawing on the research on customers’ service experience, cognitive effort, decision justification, and goal framing, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize upselling as a two-stage decision process where the process of making the first decision (i.e. deciding on an initial service option) affects the final decision (i.e. the decision for or against the upsell offer).

First, qualitative interviews were conducted both with customers as well as managers. Moreover, in two experimental studies, different scenarios depicted an upsell situation that is common in many service encounters. After choosing a hotel room or rental car for reservation, participants were confronted with differently framed arguments to induce a shift toward an enhanced but more costly version of the initially chosen service option.

The qualitative interviews reveal that upselling is a common practice in many companies and that the manner in which the upsell is communicated has a considerable influence on its effectiveness. The first experimental study finds that the cognitive effort that customers expend in the initial choice moderates the effect of upsell messages using different goal frames. The second experimental study shows that customers are only affected by different goal frames when they feel responsible for the outcome of the final decision.

The findings provide a number of useful guidelines for designing upselling strategies and may also be used to segment a firm’s customer base. On a more general level, this research also raises managers’ awareness of the sequential nature of upselling decisions and the customer’s intrinsic need to justify an upsell choice.

The studies contribute to the literature on customers’ service experience and upselling strategies. Upselling is conceptualized as a two-stage process in which customers’ experience in one phase influences their behavior in later stages. The underlying psychological mechanisms of this effect are also highlighted by referring to customers’ need to justify service choices to themselves.

This paper aims to address whether the order of entry yields competitive advantage in the discount grocery industry. More specifically, the paper aims to investigate whether such advantages are based on the effects of entry on consumer perceptions rather than factors such as technological leadership or cost efficiency.

The paper combines perceptual measures of overall preferences and attribute‐level beliefs with objective measures of attribute levels in order to explore whether entry‐based advantages in this industry are due to the relationships between entry and consumer perceptions.

The findings show that early entrants are perceived to be significantly superior to later entrants. This finding also hold true for store attributes documented to be similar across chains.

A number of papers have shown relationships between order of entry and indicators of competitive advantage. This is the first study that rules out “economic performance” based explanations for such advantages, i.e. superior efficiency, technological leadership or the pre‐emption of scarce resources.

The purpose of the study is to develop and empirically test a model which examines the relationship between e-servicescape dimensions, website quality dimensions, website stickiness, website loyalty and word-of-mouth (WOM). The role of WOM in influencing consumer behaviour is documented in literature. However, despite its growing importance, research on the antecedents of WOM in the e-retail context is sparse.

Data were collected by circulating the questionnaire using an online survey from the graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in a large university in the northeastern USA. Out of 660 questionnaires distributed, 509 were usable. Data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling.

Results show that website stickiness and website loyalty are two different constructs which form the immediate antecedents of WOM. Results also show the indirect effects of e-servicescape and website quality dimensions on WOM.

The findings of the study provides a better understanding of the factors likely to influence the WOM behaviour of e-retail store customers. Findings also provide valuable insights into the factors which managers need to focus on to make their e-retail website increasingly stickier.

The contribution of the paper lies in eliciting the differences between stickiness to and loyalty to retail websites and extending the research on e-servicescapes.

This study aims to theorize and empirically examine the relationship between “purchase intention and conversion rate”, “website satisfaction and conversion rate” and “purchase intention and conversion rate”. E-Commerce conversion rate represents the percentage of visits to an e-tailer’s website that includes a purchase transaction. Despite the importance of conversion rates for e-tailers, prior research predominantly used purchase intention and website satisfaction as main dependent variables and implicitly assumed that these variables will influence the actual purchase.

Data on 85 US retail websites were used to test the hypotheses. The unit of the analysis is the online retail website. Regression analysis was used to perform the data analysis.

The results indicate that both purchase intention and website satisfaction positively influence conversion rates. It was also found that website satisfaction positively influences purchase intention.

Only data from 85 US e-tailers from the top-100 US online retailers are used to test the hypotheses. Also, conversion rate is only one of the several important success metrics used by e-tailers.

This study not only examines antecedents of e-commerce conversion rates, but also theorizes and tests if there is a statistically significant relationship between “purchase intention and conversion rate” and “website satisfaction and conversion rate”. This is because, although previous studies used purchase intention and website satisfaction as main dependent variables and proxies for actual purchase behavior, they did not validate this relationship. This study shows that: there is a statistically significant relationship between “purchase intention and conversion rate” and “website satisfaction and conversion rate”, there is also a statistically significant relationship between “website satisfaction and purchase intention” and this study used firm-level data to theorize, measure and analyze the data, whereas prior literature used only individual-level data.