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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the headlined eco-bulkers ordered in 2012 and 2013 are posing a threat to the less-efficient ships ordered at the end of the boom in 2008 and 2009.

This paper will first investigate the drivers for the interest in such low-emission, low-speed bulker as well as the more general history of bulker designs. This is followed by a study on the vessels delivered between 2005 and 2014, based on eight parameters representing fuel efficiency, speed and hydromechanics properties. Within these results, evidence is sought for a significant change in the qualities of the vessels delivered after the last boom.

The data showed that at least till present, no significant changes could be discovered between 2014 and the earlier years. This indicates that either because of the long delivery times at the end of the boom, such vessels are still to be delivered, or that they were not ordered in an amount large enough to change the trend. For the future, this fact and the changes in vessel design resulting from the introduction of the energy efficiency design index (EEDI) in 2017 and the large fluctuations in the fuel prices will be interesting to keep monitoring the developments in the eight studied parameters.

This paper extends (in time) and improves (number of variables studied) a number of earlier studies on average qualities of the world fleet. It studies both the composition and the changes in average properties of the ships produced each year. It allowed the author to discover and explain the trends that would not have been evident when studying ships as single units or as the result of a business opportunity optimisation. Most important of which is the fact that, on average, ships produced are optimised for the current economic conditions and are not taken into consideration for future trends and scenarios.

Focal service providers increasingly involve customers in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties. The present study investigates how customers' outsourcing decisions affect the formation of the waiting experience with the focal service provider, by which the objective waiting time, environmental quality and interactional quality act as focal drivers.

To test our hypotheses in the context of cancer care, we gathered process data and experience data by means of a patient observation template (n = 640) and a patient survey (n = 487). The combined data (n = 377) were analyzed using Bayesian models.

This study shows that opting for a service triad (i.e. outsourcing non-core services to a third party) deduces customers' attention away from the objective waiting time with the focal service provider but not from the environmental and interactional quality offered by the focal service provider. When the type of service triad coordination is considered, we observe similar effects for a focal service provider-coordinated service triad while in a customer-coordinated service triad the interactional quality is the sole experience driver of waiting experiences that remains significant.

By investigating the implications of customer participation in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties, this research contributes to the service design, service triad and service operations literature. Specifically, this study shows that customer outsourcing decisions impact waiting experience formation with the focal service provider.