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This paper investigates the determinants of customer choice of a car maintenance service provider after the warranty period. It focuses on the alternative of using branded car dealers, who provide this service during the warranty period, or independent garages.

A comprehensive list of 30 service attributes is developed drawing on the service quality literature, specific previous studies on car maintenance services, and including other purchase behaviour determinants such as perceived value. Simple random sampling with replacement is used to collect data from 400 car owners using the actual choice of a service provider as the dependent variable. A quantitative analysis using a set of logistic regressions links directly customer choice to the service attributes.

Service attributes that determine customer choice are the ones consumers simultaneously consider important and perceive differences in performance between the service providers. The branded dealers service operation proved to be relatively weak, having only one of these attributes, while being better evaluated in less important ones. Independent garages have a much better offer justifying their gain in market share.

Only economic cars (1,000 cc) were analysed. Convenience and location were only partially controlled and could play a more significant role in some decision settings. Logistic regressions could effectively predict customer choice in close to 90 per cent of the cases demonstrating the adequacy of including other service attributes beyond the ones covered in the service quality literature.

Directions for improvement in the operations of both branded dealers and independent garages could be derived and some recent moves by both types of players could be supported by the results.

Investigation of the Brazilian setting and the methodological approach of linking actual customer choice to the extended set of service attributes by the combination of logistic regressions and the importance rating of the attributes.

The absorptive capacity (AC) leads to firm performance and influences the development and evolution of capabilities and routines, but the influence of AC in projects remains unclear. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effect of AC on project performance (PP) in the construction industry of Sao Paulo State, Brazil.

The authors conducted a survey questionnaire with project managers and collected 157 responses in the construction sector. They also used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and multiple linear regression techniques to assess the data.

The study provides empirical evidence that realized absorptive capacity (RAC) has a direct and indirect positive effect on PP. Conversely, the potential absorptive capacity (PAC) only indirectly impacts PP through project management practices (PMPs). PAC and RAC positively influence PMPs that in turn positively influence PP. The findings reinforce the relevance of AC to the development of internal knowledge for processes and routines, thereby enhancing PP.

The findings provide practical implications: the AC influences PP by refining and adapting routines. Moreover, the consistent application of accepted practices is not enough for PP, but the ability to adapt, adjust and transform the relevant knowledge into routines.

This paper provides empirical evidence that the knowledge application of PMPs improves organizational performance through PP. However, despite what the literature has discussed, this paper proved that AC has no effect as a moderating factor between PMPs and performance; however, AC's role significantly impacts PP through PMPs.

The existing literature is fragmented across disciplines and does not provide a holistic, comprehensive view on how value is created, deployed and captured. This paper aims to provide a structured view of the current literature and facilitates a theoretical understanding of value creation and capture in buyer–supplier relationships.

A systematic literature review was conducted on 195 articles published in 21 leading journals in marketing, operations management and strategy disciplines.

An integrated, generalizable and expandable framework is proposed based on the causal or interactive relationship among four components, namely, dimensions of value creation; processes and interactions by which buyers and suppliers enable value creation; relationship characteristics that affect these components; and value capture. Two new areas for future studies are also suggested.

The findings are based on papers published in peer-reviewed academic literature. Future studies could include more heterogeneous publications in languages other than English and/or professional journals to compare scholars' and managers' perspectives.

This study offers simple, practical guidelines that managers can apply in their real-world situations to increase the value they gain from their relationships.

The framework does not pretend to be exhaustive because such an attempt would be impractical. Rather, this study provides practical examples for each component, and shows how additional concepts and constructs can be incorporated to make it inclusive and generalizable. Two new manners of value capture other than price negotiations are presented (volume and collaborative benefits).

The purpose of this paper is to identify the operational capabilities in an emerging country, and to analyze the trade-off effect between the quality capability and the cost capability.

The empirical data were drawn from 160 firms in Brazil. Scales were validated using the Q-sort method and confirmatory factor analysis. Different techniques were adopted to reduce common method variance. Data were analyzed using multiple line regression.

The results showed that quality has a positive relationship with delivery, flexibility, innovation and sustainability capabilities. However, it was not possible to observe a positive relationship between quality and cost that confirmed the presence of a trade-off between these two capabilities.

An important practical contribution of this study is that it brings a new perspective to the relationship between quality and cost. Although quality is an important capability for the firm, emerging country managers need to understand that its implementation will take time and money; quality does not indicate an immediate reduction in cost.

This study helps expand research into operational capabilities in lesser-developed countries, such as Brazil. Most of the research on operational capabilities is conducted in industrialized countries. The paper also discusses the trade-off between the quality capability and cost capability. The results show that quality does not always lead to a reduction in cost.