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This paper investigates the determinants of the capital structure of large corporations headquartered in the United States and Korea. We consider five explanatory variables: profit, company size, non‐debt tax shields, growth, and business‐risk, along with several industry indicator variables as independent variables and examine, for each country, the relationship to market value based leverage ratio. With our rigid criteria for inclusion in the study, we study the top thirteen companies (by size) in each of seven industries. The majority of our findings indicate that we can generalize to Korea what has been found for Japanese companies/industries relative to the U.S.

Despite recognition of its importance to Singapore’s economy, the construction industry is plagued by poor safety and productivity performance. Improvement efforts by the government and industry have yielded little results. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for developing a productivity and safety monitoring system using Building Information Modelling (BIM).

The framework, Intelligent Productivity and Safety System (IPASS), takes advantage of mandatory requirements for building plans to be submitted for approval in Singapore in BIM format. IPASS is based on a study comprising interviews and a questionnaire-based survey. It uses BIM to integrate buildable design, prevention and control of hazards, and safety assessment.

The authors illustrate a development of IPASS capable of generating productivity and safety scores for construction projects by analysing BIM model information.

The paper demonstrates that BIM can be used to monitor productivity and safety as a project progresses, and help to enhance performance under the two parameters.

IPASS enables collaboration among project stakeholders as they can base their work on analysis of productivity and safety performance before projects start, and as they progress. It is suggested that the BIM model submitted to the authorities should be used for the IPASS application.

IPASS has rule-checking, hazards identification and quality checking capabilities. It is able to identify hazards and risks with the rule-checking capabilities. IPASS enables practitioners to check mistakes and the rationality of a design. It helps to mitigate risks as there are built-in safety measures/controls rules to overcome the problems caused by design deficiency, wrong-material-choice, and more.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse children's impact on innovation decision making empirically.

This paper is a diary study with 14 parents depicting their experiences with regard to the topic of interest over a period of two weeks.

Children's influence is stronger in earlier stages of the innovation buying process, based on different communication strategies with differing effects on their parents' purchasing behaviour.

This paper helps marketers tailor appropriate marketing and innovation strategies. Special attention is given to the familial dynamics in the innovation decision‐making process. This is to prevent inter‐family conflicts fuelled by the children's requests.

This is one of the first attempts to test Rogers' innovation‐decision process. Moreover, despite its many bonuses, the diary method has rarely been applied in the context of familial purchase decision making.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of family communication patterns (FCP) on adolescents’ choice of influence strategies and parents’ choice of response strategies in situations of parent–child purchase decision disagreement.

This study uses family triadic (mother–father–child) survey data collected from 294 Korean families. The study develops classifications of adolescent influence strategies and parental response strategies in the initial stage and subsequently investigates the impact of FCP on the adolescent child’s use of influence strategies and each parent’s use of response strategies. The final stage of the study involved an exploratory investigation aimed at discovering the adolescent influence strategies and parental response strategies that are likely used in conjunction.

Results show an overall significant impact of FCP on both adolescents’ use of influence strategies and parents’ use of response strategies. They further reveal that Korean mothers tended to encounter their children’s persistent influence attempts with unyielding, strict response strategies. The types of response strategies used by Korean fathers were not linked to particular types of influence strategies used by their children but linked to their level of education attained and household income.

Findings of this study may help marketers formulate an appropriate marketing communication strategy that can be effective in resolving parent–child purchase disagreement.

With its focus on the adolescent influence strategies, parental response strategies, and FCP as a factor influencing the strategy choice by adolescents and parents, this study provides new insights into the parent–child interaction taking place in situations of parent–child disagreement about a purchase decision.

Aims to investigate the structural relationships between out‐patient satisfaction and service quality dimensions under a South Korea health care system where patients have substantial freedom in choosing their medical service providers and to further study the causal relationship between service quality and satisfaction between out‐patient subgroups obtained on the basis of gender, age and types of services received.

After assessing the construct validity of the service quality dimensions based on confirmatory factor analysis, a path model specifying the relationships between service quality dimensions and patient satisfaction was estimated. The next analysis was a series of multi‐sample analyses. A multigroup LISREL analysis was used to test the invariance of structural paths between service quality dimensions and patient satisfaction.

Results indicated that the general causal relationship between service quality and patient satisfaction was well supported in the South Korean health‐care delivery system. An examination of the estimated path coefficients showed that the pattern of relationships between service quality and patient satisfaction was similar across the gender, age, and service type subgroups. Results also revealed that the level of satisfaction, on the other hand, was not the same for subgroups when divided by age and the types of services received.

Since the majority of the past studies have been geographically concentrated in the countries in North America and Western Europe, the findings of this study expand understanding of the relationships between service quality and patient satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of health-care service quality (HCSQ) dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intentions in selected corporate hospitals from South India.

Based on Parasuraman et al.’s SERVQUAL variables, the study tried to identify the effects of each variable to patient satisfaction and behavioural intentions. Data were collected through systematic random sampling among 500 in-patients of corporate hospitals with minimum four days stay were considered for the in-patients’ sample. Structural equation modelling technique was used to investigate the effect of HCSQ dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intention.

The findings suggest that in addition to “patient satisfaction”, the only HCSQ dimension that directly affects behavioural intention is “empathy”. In addition, “empathy” affects “responsiveness”, “assurance” and “tangibles” which, in turn, have only an indirect effect to behavioural intention through “patient satisfaction”.

This research investigated the HCSQ dimensions effects on patient satisfaction and behavioural intention from the perspective of patients and corporate hospitals run by the private players. This paper contributes to the body of academic knowledge by shedding more light into the role of HCSQ dimensions, and especially “empathy”, in the intentions for corporate hospital patients.

An understanding of the direct and indirect effect of HCSQ dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intentions is important to corporate hospital marketing managers because it offers them the opportunity to take certain actions for improving patients’ satisfaction and these actions increase their intention to revisit.

The paper manages to investigate the effects of HCSQ dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intention, especially in the health-care marketing sector.

To sustain competitive advantage, it is necessary to understand consumers and their psychological fears and deliver them a service solution which is best under existing conditions so as to ensure consumer loyalty and retention. This paper seeks to conceptualise and operationalise customer relationship management (CRM) through two component model (operational CRM (OCRM) and analytical CRM (ACRM)), particularly in the healthcare sector.

The relationship between OCRM, based on three patient‐staff constructs (physicians, nurses and support staff) and ACRM based on four constructs (satisfaction, repatronization, recommendation and organizational performance) was analysed using confirmatory factor analysis (AMOS). The data for the model were collected from 306 indoor patients of three large public hospitals who have been associated with the hospital for at least five years.

The model portraying service quality as an antecedent to OCRM is found to be acceptable whereas the other two models, namely, service quality as the moderating variable in explaining OCRM and ACRM relationship effectively and direct relationship between OCRM (service quality implicit) and OCRM) were rejected. Characteristics, primarily caring attitude, friendliness, helpfulness, response to queries, expertise and effective treatment are found to be significant for OCRM from physicians, nurses and support staff perspectives that can impact the four ACRM dimensions – satisfaction, repatronization, recommendation and organizational performance.

The study contributes to the current understanding of CRM in particular and consumer behaviour in general, in the context of the healthcare sector. The role of service quality in influencing patient‐staff interaction and CRM linkage with the service dominant concept has added more strength to the conceptual development of TCRM.

This paper aims to examine the effects of gender and visit frequency as moderating variables on the relationships among destination perceived quality, tourist satisfaction and word-of-mouth (WOM).

This study incorporated several previous research models to propose a conceptual model that fully explains the relationships among destination perceived quality, tourist satisfaction, visit frequency and WOM. One important thing to consider is whether gender and visit frequency impact on the relationships among these factors. In addition, this study was able to generate measurement items for the dimensions by analyzing specific tourism conditions in Danang City and referring to the scales of these factors in previous studies. Quantitative research was conducted to test the scales of the research model and hypotheses through data collected from 303 domestic tourists.

Structural equation modeling and a multi-group analysis were used to test the hypotheses and the invariance of structural coefficients across groups. The results indicate that destination perceived quality has significant, positive and direct effect on tourist satisfaction; WOM is positively influenced by destination perceived quality and tourist satisfaction; and there is significant relationship between visit frequency and WOM. In particular, when exploring the impact of moderating variables such as gender and visit frequency, this study also found that the impacts of destination perceived quality on WOM are different between genders, and this impact is stronger for female rather than male tourists; and the effect of destination perceived quality on tourist satisfaction is stronger for the first visit than for later visits.

This paper is limited in its ability to gather a larger sample to more generally represent the complete domestic market, as well as in its lack of a comparison of online versus offline WOM effects by gender.

This paper was conducted to have a better understanding of how tourist demographic characteristics such as gender and visit frequency are important contributors that influence the relationships among these three factors. This paper has important implications for marketers and managers of Danang, such as local tourism authorities, commercial association managers, hotel owners, restaurant owners and tour managers working to improve the quality of this destination, and thus better satisfying tourists and competing with other destinations.

This study investigates the impacts of return channel type on the relationships between return service quality (RSQ) and customer loyalty (CL) in an omnichannel retailing environment.

Data comes from Chinese customers having a return experience in omnichannel retailing that uses the channel type of both buy-online-return-in-store (BORIS) and buy-in-store-return-to-online warehouses (BSROW). The authors use the structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses and the bootstrapping method to test the mediation and moderation effect.

For BORIS channel, satisfaction of customer returns (CRS) partially mediates the relationship between convenience and CL, and fully mediates that between CL and responsiveness, transparency and competence, respectively. For BSROW channel, CRS partially mediates the relationship between responsiveness and CL, and fully mediates that between CL and convenience, transparency and competence, respectively. The mediation effects indicate that omnichannel customers may feel more satisfied due to higher omnichannel fulfillment (responsiveness and convenience) and omnichannel trust (transparency and competence) provided by retailers. Return channel type moderates the relationship between RSQ-convenience and CL. The results show the different expectations between BORIS and BSROW customers in the return process.

This paper serves as a pioneering study to apply cognition-affect-behavior paradigm into the field of return management in omnichannel retailing.

The findings suggest retailers develop their strategies on customer returns and post-sales service quality improvement in the omnichannel. Also, retailers should develop an integrated return system across channels to provide convenient service to BORIS customers and quick response to BSROW customers.

Studying return service management in the omnichannel from customer's cognition appraisal, this study contributes to the literature of the reverse service management by bringing in the effect of omnichannel type to explore the relationship between RSQ and CL.