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With the goal of helping consumers bounce back from the financial challenges they faced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many firms developed and announced consumer-targeted resiliency programs (e.g. Walgreens waived delivery fees, Associated Bank allowed deferred mortgage payments). However, there is a paucity of research examining the unique features of these programs, and whether firms' investors (the first external stakeholder group to provide them with feedback regarding their strategies) were receptive to these programs during a period of time in which firms themselves were suffering financially. Drawing on resilience theory and stakeholder theory, the present research incorporates an event study of consumer-targeted resiliency program announcements to understand their financial implications for firms, and to learn whether firms witnessed different financial effects as a result of firm- and program-specific factors.

This study referred to business news publications and newswire services to collect a comprehensive list of consumer-targeted resiliency programs announced by publicly traded U.S. firms during the pandemic. The resulting dataset consisted of 145 announcements made during the period of February–June 2020. An event study was conducted in order to precisely measure the main effect of consumer-targeted resiliency programs on firm value, as manifested through abnormal stock returns. Finally, a moderation analysis (regression) was conducted to uncover whether firm characteristics or specific features of firms' consumer-targeted resiliency programs lead certain firms to witness stronger financial effects than others.

The main effect of consumer-targeted resiliency programs on firm value was found to be positive – a 1.9% increase on average. The moderation analysis finds that non-financial firms were rewarded more positively than financial firms (e.g. banks and credit card companies). In addition, financial aid (i.e. allowing customers to defer their payments to a firm for its products/services, versus a reduction in the price of a product/service or offering it for free or giving cash back to customers) and temporal characteristics (i.e. an offer being framed as limited-time, vs being indefinite or for the foreseeable future) are not found to have a moderating effect.

This theory-driven empirical study uncovers practical implications for managers of firms interested in whether investing in corporate social responsibility during times of crisis is a wise allocation of resources. Any form of financial aid for consumers, regardless of temporal limitations, is received positively by investors.

While within-firm service failure and recovery have been studied extensively, the context in which a service failure at one firm “spills over” and provides an opportunity for an external firm (a subsequent service provider) to recover (compensate) a customer has received limited attention. This study aims to examine how the extent of a service failure plays a role in how external firms should shape their recovery efforts, and how customers’ evaluations of the recovering firm and their feelings of unhappiness are affected.

A pretest conducted on MTurk gauged participants’ perceptions of equitability of the external firm’s recovery effort. In the main study, a 3 × 3 between-subjects experiment examined the effects of failure extent and external recovery type on evaluations of the recovering firm and reduced feelings of unhappiness.

It is found that equity judgments remain consistent in the external recovery context; transferred negative affect is able to be mitigate only in low-failure scenarios, and customers’ evaluations of the external firm increase only in high-failure scenarios.

The use of hypothetical scenarios, as opposed to the employment of a field study, is the primary limitation of the study.

This research finds that external firms can reap the benefits of another firm’s service failure by offering no-cost recoveries, rather than ones that carry some form of cost.

To avoid wastage of resources of a startup accelerator, this paper aims to present a model for accelerator managers’ decision-making to enter startups into acceleration and initial capitalization using a fuzzy Delphi approach and an affinity diagram is one of the design thinking tools.

The high failure rate of startups has led to a waste of resources and a lot of capital. This failure rate is much higher in the early stages of startups and subsequently higher risk. This is where startup accelerators play a role in supporting startups and provide startups with the capital needed to accelerate. The point to note at this point is that choosing the team with the lowest success potential by the accelerators will eliminate their capital and energy. The purpose of this research is to avoid this wastage.

In this research, using the Fuzzy Delphi method and aggregation of opinions of 5 experts and managers of the acceleration field, additional criteria were eliminated and 35 criteria were considered as final criteria of the evaluation model. In the final stage, a 10-member committee of managers, specialists and faculty members was formed and the criteria were grouped using the affinity diagram method. Finally, the final model was presented considering the components of a business plan.

Using design thinking methods and a combination of that with a fuzzy and quantitative method is one of the contributions of this research. Also, making a model for selection startups in the acceleration stage of fundraising is another value of this research.