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This paper aims to examine the effect of music tempo on impatience in intertemporal tradeoff decisions. It finds that fast (vs slow) tempo music increases impatience. This occurs because fast (vs slow) tempo music makes temporal distance, and hence the waiting time until the receipt of delayed benefits, feel subjectively longer.

The study tests the hypotheses through four laboratory experiments.

In Studies 1a (N = 88) and 1b (N = 98), the results demonstrate that when participants listen to fast (vs slow) tempo music, they judge temporal distance to be longer. In Study 2 (N = 94), the results demonstrate that when participants listen to fast (vs slow) tempo music, they become more impatient when considering a smartphone purchase. In Study 3 (N = 218), the results demonstrate that when participants listen to fast (vs slow) tempo music, they become more impatient when considering a gift certificate, and that this delay discounting effect is attributable to the change in their temporal distance judgment.

The current research reports a novel factor that influences impatience in intertemporal decisions and temporal distance judgment.

This research provides useful guidelines for retail managers and marketers regarding the effect of background music in stores.

This is the first study demonstrating a music tempo effect on temporal distance judgment and impatience in intertemporal tradeoff decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the main measures of inconsistency in the context of intertemporal choice and to identify the relationships between them (more specifically, the measures by Prelec, Takahashi and Rohde). In effect, Thaler (1981), awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics 2017, argued that when a preference must be expressed between two reward options, some people may reverse their original preference when a significant delay is introduced before the reward is to be received. This anomaly is known as inconsistency in intertemporal choice.

After a revision of the existing literature and by using the methods from mathematical calculus, the authors have derived the logical relationships between the measures presented in this paper.

The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of a novel parameter, the so-defined ratio of two instantaneous discount rates, which the authors call the instantaneous variation rate, which allows relating some other measures of inconsistency, namely the measures described by Prelec and Rohde. A limitation of this paper is the unavailability of empirical information about the inconsistency measures needed to substantiate the theoretical findings. Indeed, this paper has social implications because recent behavioral and neuroeconomic studies have shown the existence of preference reversal or time inconsistency in other areas. The authors’ models can be implemented in these fields in order to better analyze the situations of inconsistency.

The originality of this paper lies in the authors’ aim to bring some order to the proposed measures of inconsistency which have arisen as a result of the different approaches adopted.

This paper aims to study students' strategic behaviors for increasing their job prospect in response to university administrators' moves for lifting up institutional reputation in the academia.

A Stackelberg differential game is used to study this strategic interplay between administrators and students. In this game, an administrator maximizes institutional quality to build university reputation while student maximizes grades to increase their job prospects. Therefore, administrators being the leader move first while students set strategies for maximizing their objective function by following administrators' move.

The study produces several distinctive results by analyzing administrator–students’ strategic interactions. First, university administrators need to be sufficiently more impatient for building reputation by improving institutional quality than students’ impatience for increasing their job prospects to have feasible solutions. Second, students attempt to increase academic grades for making them more marketable in response to administrators’ additional efforts for increasing their students’ job prospects. Third, exogenous increase in university reputation improves institutional quality and students’ job prospects without affecting their academic grades. However, increase in job prospects motivates students to increase their grades. Fourth, administrators’ too much impatience for increasing university reputation could inflate students’ grade, reduce job prospect and degrade institutional quality. Fifth, an exogenous rise in students’ impatience improves institutional quality and students’ job prospects but reduces students’ grades. Finally, the exogenous increase in opportunity cost of securing good grade degrades institutional quality, thus reducing further job prospects. Therefore, administrators’ positive but moderate impatience for reputation will improve students’ academic performances, institutional quality and job prospects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyze students’ strategic responses for improving their job prospects in response to administrators’ actions for enhancing university reputation. It helps administrators to design an effective framework for building university reputation in the academic market through improving institutional quality and expanding job markets for their students.

This paper aims to show that whether new customers respond well or poorly to small talk at the beginning of a service encounter depends on their relationship orientation, i.e. how exchange or communally oriented they are. The authors provide service providers with tactics to identify first-time customers’ relationship orientation or set customers’ small talk expectations and thus help them use small talk more effectively.

The authors examine the effect of small talk and relationship orientation on customer intentions to use a service provider in three experiments and one cross-sectional survey. The scenario-based experiments show causality and the effect in online and in-person scenarios. The survey replicates the effect among current customers of a small business.

Communally oriented customers respond positively to small talk, but exchange-oriented customers respond negatively to it. Mediation analyses reveal this occurs because small talk differentially leads to initial feelings of rapport and impatience for people high (versus low) in relationship orientation.

Service providers should consider customers’ relationship orientation before starting a conversation with small talk. The authors find providers can identify exchange-oriented customers by their choice of meeting format (in-person v. video chat). Managers can also use marketing materials to attract customers with a specific relationship orientation or to set customer expectations for small talk in the interaction.

Prior research has largely shown benefits to small talk, but the authors show significant downsides for some customers and to the best of the authors’ knowledge are the first to show process evidence of why these drawbacks occur.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of bargaining powers of firms in supply chain coordination. It studies selected aspects of bargaining powers, namely, impatience, breakdown probability and outside options, and uses a bargaining-theoretic approach to analyze surplus allocation in a coordinated supply chain.

This paper proposes one-supplier one-buyer infinite horizon supply chain coordination game, where suppliers and buyers negotiate for the allocation of supply chain surplus arising out of supply chain coordination. Various aspects of the bargaining power of the negotiating parties are modeled and the paper studies impact of power levels on the results of the bargaining game.

A significance of impatience on the bargaining process and the surplus split has been established. This paper also demonstrates a rather counter-intuitive aspect of bargaining that the impatience (as perceived by the other party) can improve the bargaining position and therefore share of profits.

This paper has limited its analysis to three key components of bargaining power. Future works can study other aspects of bargaining power, namely information asymmetry, learning curve, inside options, etc. Further, the paper has considered an infinite horizon model – this assumption can be relaxed in future research.

Equations to derive optimal split of the surplus have been derived and can be leveraged to design an autonomous bargaining agent to discover equilibrium profit splits in a cloud or e-commerce setting. Further, insights from this paper can be leveraged by managers to understand their relative bargaining power and drive to obtain the best profit split.

This paper establishes that impatience (in terms of counter-offer probability) has a significant impact on the bargaining position and on the split of the surplus that the firm can get for themselves. It establishes the advantage of higher levels of impatience, provided the other party recognizes the impatience and factors it in their decision-making process.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the body of logistics customer service (LCS) research published in leading logistics journals from 1990 to 2017. Specifically, the paper presents a call to arms for logistics and supply chain researchers to address new and emerging issues impacting customer service in the age of omnichannel and e-commerce retailing.

The authors reviewed academic journals to identify articles focusing on LCS from 1990 through 2017. The authors noted trends in academic research activity/focus and supplemented the findings by examining more recent trends covered in trade publication articles.

The authors observed a large amount of LCS research in the early 1990s and 2000s, but noticed a substantial decline in coverage within academic journals since the late 2000s while industry continues to give customer service issues even greater attention. The difference between the level of coverage within academic journals and the increased importance firms place on customer service represents a critical gap and opportunity for scholars. This research represents a “call to arms” to address this gap. With particular emphasis on observed customer impatience and escalating requests, within omni- and e-commerce channels of distribution, we suggest greater theoretical insights into customer service strategies and their role in successfully navigating today’s changing logistics service environment are needed.

The review serves as a call for more attention to customer service issues within leading logistics journals. Suggestions for research into new and emerging topics are offered.

This paper aims to consider a single server queue with system disasters and impatience behavior are evident in our daily life. For this purpose, authors require to know the general behavior of these systems. Transient analysis shows for us how the system will operate up to some time instant t.

In this paper, authors consider a single server queue with system disaster and impatient behavior of customers in a multi-phase random environment, in which the system transits to a repair state after each system disaster. When the system is in a failure phase or going through a repair phase, the new arrivals would be impatient. In case the system is not repaired before the customer’s time expires, the customer would leave the queue and never return. Moreover, after repair, the system becomes ready for service in an operative phase with probability $q_{i} \ge 0.$. Using generating functions along with continued fractions and some properties of the confluent hypergeometric function, authors obtained on their own results.

Explicit expressions have been obtained for the time-dependent probabilities of the underlying queuing model. Also, time-dependent mean and variance of customers in the system are deduced.

The system authors are dealing with is somewhat complicated, there are some performance measures that cannot be achieved, but some of them have been obtained, such as the expectation and variance of the number of customers in the system.

Based on the obtained results, some numerical examples are some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effect of various parameters on the behavior of the proposed system.

Authors’ studied transient analysis of a single server queue with system disaster and impatient customer system is suitable for behavior interpretation of many systems in our lives, such as telecommunication networks, inventory systems and impatient telephone switchboard customers, manufacturing system and service system.

To the best of the author’s/authors’ knowledge and according to the literature survey, in a multi-phase random environment, no previous published article is presented for transient analysis of a single server queue with system disaster and impatient customer behavior in a random environment.