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When developing a new product, a buying firm solicits revenue sharing bids from two competing suppliers. Bidding behaviors of suppliers do not always align with predictions from rational agent models due to task uncertainty and bounded rationality, which could result in non-optimal supplier offers and ultimately hurt buying firm interests. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issues.

The authors built an analytical model that considers the impact of supplier technological risk, buyer–supplier coordination cost and supplier loss aversion on the optimal bid of the supplier. Next, using limited information processing capacity as a theoretic lens, the authors explore antecedents to the size of a focal supplier's bidding error, the absolute difference between the actual bid and the optimal bid. The authors used quantitative lab experimental data to test the hypotheses.

(1) Bounded rational bidders often fail to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant competitive information when placing bids, (2) loss aversion of a bidder significantly affects not only levels of bids, particularly for bidders with competitive disadvantages, but also sizes of the bidding error and (3) competitive information that has clearer performance implications are more influential in reducing sizes of bidding errors.

The results provide a comprehensive view of the bidding behaviors of a bounded rational supplier in an innovation outsourcing context with competition. With the results, managers now have a better understanding of behavioral influencers behind non-optimal supplier bids in an innovation outsourcing context.

In retail settings, customer satisfaction is generally associated with a global evaluation of the store, i.e. the store image. Waiting for service is not part of the store image dimensions, but it does play an increasingly important role in the retail experience where waits are often inevitable. The present study seeeks to investigate how waiting for service at the checkout counter influences overall satisfaction, along with the store image.

The study combines services marketing and waiting literature. Data were collected in various supermarkets in The Netherlands. A partial least squares regression technique is used to analyze the data.

The paper demonstrates an important and complementary role of the behavioural construct “negative response to the wait” in explaining overall customer satisfaction in a retail environment. The effect of customers' negative emotional response to the wait on satisfaction is partially mediated by store image, and explained variance in the dependent variable increases by 24 percent when the effect of the wait at the checkout is included.

Measuring customer satisfaction without taking into account the effects of various waits during the retail experience will produce incomplete results.

Moreover, a range of controllable factors influences the customer's wait. Intelligently managing these factors can mitigate negative effects on customer satisfaction, or even increase the overall evaluation of the service. Specific recommendations for service managers and a research agenda are provided.

The study combines service marketing and waiting literature to address the issue of waiting in line and tests the theory with real‐world data from a field study.

In e‐commerce, loyal customers are considered extremely valuable. Loyalty is generally attributed to satisfaction with the quality of service. Since online transactions involve many uncertainties for the customer, trust is a condition for exchange. Trust in the electronic medium – here called “e‐trust” – is believed to increase online customer loyalty, but empirical confirmations are scarce. The present study empirically investigates the roles of service quality, satisfaction and trust in an e‐commerce context. In the study, e‐trust is found to directly affect loyalty. The e‐service quality dimension of assurance, i.e. trusting the merchant, influences loyalty via e‐trust and e‐satisfaction. Other e‐quality dimensions, such as ease of use, e‐scape, responsiveness, and customization influence e‐loyalty mainly indirectly, via satisfaction. Managerial implications and suggestions for further research are provided.

To introduce the special issue focusing on the QUIS 9 symposium.

A brief perspective of the best papers presented at the Quality in Services (QUIS9) symposium held at Karlstad university, Sweden in June 2004.

Outlines some of the highlights surrounding the conference.

Provides a brief report of the context of the conference.