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Do customers recognize the effort and abilities of employees in service encounters? If so, to what extent do their perceptions influence customer satisfaction? The paper seeks to answer these questions.

Two empirical studies, including a critical incident study and a video‐based experiment. Theoretically, this paper builds on motivation theory, naïve psychology, and attribution theory.

Customers spontaneously and explicitly judge service encounters on the basis of service employees' effort and abilities, perceived through certain behavioral cues. The specific, direct impact of perceived effort and abilities on customer satisfaction varies for different service types.

Taking different dependent variables into account (e.g. customer emotions, customer loyalty and brand perceptions) might offer a valuable contribution to the fields of service or brand research.

Companies must examine customers' perceptions of their employees' encounter behavior in depth to evaluate and effectively and efficiently manage perceived effort and abilities as the main determinants of customer satisfaction. They should acknowledge behavioral training represents a significant satisfaction management approach.

The paper offers interdisciplinary theoretical foundation, brings in innovative research methods and combines content and methodology to a new scientific framework for the field of service research as well as practical application for companies.

This paper aims to assess the impact of perceived effort related to packaging on overall product evaluations. Perceived effort, defined as the consumer’s perceptions of how much manufacturer effort that lies behind an offer, is assumed to contribute to evaluations by signaling unobservable characteristics of an offer.

Three between-subjects experiments were conducted with soft drink bottles, which were subject to variation in perceived effort.

The results show that perceived effort was positively associated with overall evaluations. The results also show that the impact of perceived effort was mediated by product quality perceptions, which indicates that effort signals quality.

Perceived effort has to date not been examined in the packaging literature. The present findings thus imply that models of packaging characteristics and their impact on consumers would benefit from including the effort aspect.

Climate change poses diverse, often fundamental, challenges to livelihoods of island peoples. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that these challenges must be better understood before effective and sustainable adaptation is possible.

Understanding past livelihood impacts from climate change can help design and operationalize future interventions. In addition, globalization has had uneven effects on island countries/jurisdictions, producing situations especially in archipelagoes where there are significant differences between core and peripheral communities. This approach overcomes the problems that have characterized many recent interventions for climate-change adaptation in island contexts which have resulted in uneven and at best only marginal livelihood improvements in preparedness for future climate change.

Island contexts have a range of unique vulnerability and resilience characteristics that help explain recent and proposed responses to climate change. These include the sensitivity of coastal fringes to climate-environmental changes: and in island societies, the comparatively high degrees of social coherence, closeness to nature and spirituality that are uncommon in western contexts.

Enhanced understanding of island environmental and social contexts, as well as insights from past climate impacts and peripherality, all contribute to more effective and sustainable future interventions for adaptation.

The need for more effective and sustainable adaptation in island contexts is becoming ever more exigent as the pace of twenty-first-century climate change increases.