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Construction defects in residential buildings are causing significant impacts both on consumers and the industry. As a consequence, several countries have established new home warranty schemes. However, designing a public policy for domestic building warranties can become a difficult task. In fact, many of these programs in the past have failed, collapsed or gone bankrupt. Therefore, the purpose of the current research is to provide a systematic comparative representation of various active programs internationally.

The methodology relied on a multiple-case study research design. The case selection covered a total of nine jurisdictions with compulsory home warranty programs. Those included Japan, France, United Kingdom, three provinces in Canada (Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta), and three states in Australia (New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland). The study applied a data collection protocol to gather all the evidence in a replicable manner for each individual case. Subsequently, a cross-case analysis was conducted to identify similarities and variations between programs.

The findings unveiled institutional practices that aimed to resolve, compensate, or rectify defects in residential constructions within these countries. The review mostly suggested that every home warranty program presents certain unique characteristics. At the end, this paper proposed an analytical illustration representing the diversification of components adopted by each jurisdiction.

Nowadays, there is still not a consensus within the academic community on what is an optimal solution when conceiving a new home warranty program. Hence, the current study aims to fill this knowledge gap by presenting the plurality of methods employed by several countries. This paper seeks to help policy makers and industry leaders to improve their home warranty scheme based on awareness derived from observations and analyses of what has been accomplished elsewhere in the world.

This paper aims to examine empirically whether there is a real demand for takaful products among Muslims in the UK, and to assess the awareness about takaful insurance and its main principles among UK Muslim communities.

The paper uses empirical data collected via an online questionnaire.

The study shows that the survey respondents are likely to buy car, health, home and home contents insurance if the same cover is offered as conventional insurance and if prices are competitive. The paper also shows that there is quite a lack of awareness about takaful insurance and its main principles among UK Muslim communities, and that most respondents are only aware of the riba and maysir concepts. It also showed that about half the respondents are not sure whether takaful insurance is in accordance with Islam. The majority of the respondents prefer to get takaful products via banking channels rather than from independent takaful institutions. Not surprisingly, the majority of respondents agreed to the use of Arabic terms for the Islamic insurance to show that these are Islamic products and to differentiate them from conventional alternatives in order to attract more Muslim participants.

This findings presented in this paper would encourage more banks in the UK to develop takaful products to target the rapid increase in Muslim populations in the UK and increase the demand for Islamic insurance products. Some promotion strategies may be needed to increase the customers' awareness of the existing takaful products and, more importantly, to their compliance to the Shariah law. Despite the fact that there is an obvious preference among the survey participants towards using Arabic terms in takaful products, one could argue for the financial benefits of introducing these Islamic insurance products to non‐Muslim customers where Arabic terms are avoided but with the explanations of the main concept of takaful products.

The paper examines empirically (via an online questionnaire) whether there is a real demand for takaful products among Muslims in the UK.

This paper aims to study to what extent an insurance based on a house price index provides equity protection for homeowners.

The paper uses a novel dataset of all housing market transactions in the metropolitan area of Melbourne 1990‐2006, to construct repeated sales indices of various temporal spatial aggregation. These indices are used to discuss the efficiency of index‐based insurance schemes. The paper also considers efficiency under different specifications of legitimate claims.

It is found that the payout efficiency is surprisingly stable (around 50 percent) for all temporal spatial aggregations. A neighborhood index outperforms the metropolitan index with respect to target efficiency (the probability of payout given a loss). The introduction of maturity times, say legitimate claim five years after purchase, does improve efficiency somewhat. However, the idiosyncratic component of housing market transactions remains high, and the insurance probably unattractive from a homeowner perspective.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time an index‐based insurance scheme is analyzed using real‐market transactions.

The purpose of this paper is to contrast consumer laws in England and Australia in relation to residential building projects, and considers how the laws of England may be improved in light of the Australian laws.

The paper reviews consumer laws in both England and Australia, and examines the measures that are in place (or not) to protect consumers who engage builders or purchase a home that contains latent defects.

After comparing the laws of the two countries, the conclusion is made that English law could be improved by imposing regulations on builders, including by mandating the use of written contracts for building work which are required to contain particular terms, requiring builders to be licensed and insured, and by introducing a consumer‐friendly form of dispute resolution for home building disputes.

The paper recommends that there be law reform in England.

The paper provides (so far as the authors are aware) the first comparison of English and Australian consumer laws in relation to residential building work.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify and validate reviews’ length and sentiment as correlates of online reviews’ ratings; and second, to understand the emotions embedded in online reviews and how they associate with specific words used in such reviews.

A panel data set of customer reviews was collected for auto, life, and home insurance from January 2012 to December 2015 using a web scraping technique. Using a sentiment analysis approach, 1,584 reviews for the auto, home, and life insurance services of 156 insurance companies were analyzed.

The results indicate that, since 2013, consumers have generally had more negative emotions than positive ones toward insurance services. The results also show that consumer review sentiment correlates positively and review length correlates negatively with consumer online review ratings. Furthermore, a two-way ANOVA analysis shows that, in general, short reviews with positive sentiment are associated with high review ratings.

The findings of this study provide service companies, in general, and insurance companies, in particular, with important guidelines that should be considered to increase consumers’ positive attitude toward their services.

This paper highlights the importance of sentiment analysis in identifying consumer reviews’ emotions and understanding the associations and interactions of reviews’ length and sentiment on online review rating, which can lead to improved marketing strategies.

While competition within car and home insurance increases through more players and also unfamiliar entrants to the market (supermarkets), the purpose of this paper is to report on a study of one large insurer in Ireland which attempts to differentiate itself from its peers.

The paper does this through a literature review of the insurance market and customer relationship management, and a detailed study of the company loyalty programme and its application to its customers.

The loyalty programme employed suits the particular sector in terms of purchase intention and also gives the customer of the insurance brand a sense of belonging and relevance where they can avail themselves of savings on related products.

Information sourced is based on published data from the company and other peer reviewed journals. This is a study on a simple loyalty programme that can be applied to low frequency purchases.

This simplified loyalty programme gives the brand high recognition values in terms of how the brand is made relevant to the customer through discounted related products.

As loyalty programmes are not a usual feature of financial services, this paper highlights a unique programme in operation that is being replicated elsewhere.

The relationship between personal values and behaviour has been widely studied, and previous studies have demonstrated the mediating role of attitudes. The purpose of the study is to test the “values‐attitude” relation in banking services (car insurance, life insurance, home insurance and retirement plan) on a Brazilian sample and demonstrate the role of negative incidents with services on the relation between sellers' personal values and attitudes.

The Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) and an attitude measurement developed for this research were used. The data were collected with 1,061 employers who sell these services and work in a large Brazilian bank. A structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that values of conservation were the best predictor of the attitudes, demonstrating that attitude towards bank services is explained mostly by the motivation to maintain the social tissue. However, the values showed little or no impact on the attitude of those who have had negative incidents with the services.

Results can be used on the implementation of marketing strategies, pointing to the impact of values on attitudes when individuals have not had experienced a negative incident. The research limitations are related to its setting, data collection, sample and measurements used.

This is the first research in the field using a Brazilian population. It is also one of the very few studies in the field that examines the moderating role of negative incidents on the relationship between values and attitude with bank services.

Purpose: The scope of this research is to conduct a study on the perceived effectiveness of developments in InsurTech, by determining online use integration in the Maltese insurance market.

Methodology: To do this, the authors employed a self-administered questionnaire to which 471 participants responded on a 5-point Likert scale. We subjected the data collected from this questionnaire to statistical analysis, specifically, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and multiple linear analysis using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 26.

Results: EFA loaded best on five factors of insurance customers’ perceived effectiveness, which make up the effectiveness model (EM), namely ‘Factor 1 – Internal Process Enhancement’, ‘Factor 2 – Cost-Efficiencies’; ‘Factor 3 – Time-Sensitive Conditions’, ‘Factor 4 – The Contemporary Use of Artificial Intelligence and Marketing in Relation to Customer Service’ and ‘Factor 5 – Customer Relations and Application of InsurTech in Communication’. Moreover, multiple linear regression results show that the perceived effectiveness dimension – EM is statistically significantly related to online use in Malta.

Practical implications: Therefore, it can be argued that the Maltese insurance sector is well prepared to meet the obligations and requirements of the European Green Deal. Findings shed light on the preparedness of the Maltese insurance market to accept innovative green proposals to go online with processes.

Consumer price sensitivity has become a major issue over the past few decades. This paper aims to investigate the importance that insurance customers give to premiums, insurers, intermediary recommendations and bundling strategies. The relationship between attributes and consumer price sensitivity is also studied.

To calculate the importance of attributes and part-worth utilities, a Conjoint Analysis with Full Profile was performed. To segment the market, a two-stage cluster analysis was performed. The traditional formula for estimating price elasticity of demand was also used.

Price sensitivity is affected by the level of purchase involvement, bundled discounts and brand loyalty. Also, brand loyalty has a strong influence on customer acceptance of bundled discounts. Price bundling increases a firm’s revenues and profits.

The size of the sample of the second stage of the research could be higher.

It would also be interesting to have the collaboration of an actuary to carry out more precise analysis of premium estimation of bundling strategies and to study the ideal number of products that would compose the bundling strategy. Moreover, it could be relevant to consider life insurance products as part of the bundling strategy. It would also be interesting to study whether there is any benefit in applying the bundle discount to the anchor product instead of applying it to the accessory product.

Insurers and intermediaries can benefit from price bundling strategies to increase sales and profit.

The study contributes to the service marketing literature and marketing of the insurance sector by providing empirical evidence of the impact of price bundling on insurance customer sensitivity, with the use of a methodological and experimental approach.

During the course of European integration social policy has become an increasingly important policy area of the European Union. The paper analyses whether the EU’s social‐policy measures improve the living conditions of the socially weaker groups. All three areas of European social policy are analysed: the co‐ordination of the member states’ social security systems, the harmonisation of the working conditions and the promotion of equal opportunities, social integration and vocational training. This paper shows that the EU’s social‐policy measures have numerous disadvantages. In particular, they often are detrimental to the very people who the EU intends to protect and promote.