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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of purchasing and supply strategies on business performance.

The empirical results are based on information provided on a questionnaire by purchasing managers in 180 Spanish industrial firms.

An organization's commercial and financial performance increases when it increases the relative importance of flexibility and decreases the relative importance of reductions in stock levels and purchasing prices in its supply strategy. The best performing firms are those that combine quality, dependability, and flexibility as priority objectives and relegate cost reductions to secondary importance.

Although the research is designed to mitigate the effect of common method bias, it still depends on perceptual measures of performance. Further research should enlarge the list of generic competitive objectives to take into account newer dimensions cited in existing literature, such as innovation or environmental management.

The results provide useful information for managers who wish to configure an optimal profile of competitive objectives for their purchasing and supply function.

The paper uses an approach that introduces two innovative elements. First, strategy is conceived of as a profile of generic competitive objectives, not as a set of practices deployed by the purchasing function. Second, the study introduces the concept of the relative importance of a competitive objective, rather than the absolute importance of that objective, which enables an analysis of the effect of the interrelationships among the different competitive objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to report results from an experimental study in which participants rank e-tailer quality on the basis of descriptions involving five attributes (reputation of retailer, site usability, security, delivery and customer support). The paper further explores how the relative importance of these attributes to perceived e-tailer quality is impacted by customer demographic and behavioral characteristics (such as gender, age, frequency of online purchasing and use of online reviews).

Individual-level conjoint models are estimated to determine the relative importance of these five attributes to perceptions of e-tailer quality.

The relative importance of these five attributes to perceived e-tailer quality are impacted by customer specific characteristics and online behaviors, namely, age, the frequency of prior online purchasing, the frequency of use of online reviews and the importance attached to the availability of a large number of online product reviews.

Managerial implications that help e-tailers develop more effective, targeted strategies for enhancing the quality of their websites and increasing customer loyalty are presented.

The use of conjoint analysis for decomposing overall judgments of e-tailer quality to derive the relative importance of specific e-tailing attributes offers a realistic way to understand how online customers perceive and evaluate e-tailer quality.

Motivated by ongoing calls for auditors to exercise an elevated level of professional skepticism, this paper aims to examine the relationship between basic human values (values) and an underlying skeptical disposition (trait skepticism). Understanding the values that are associated with levels of trait skepticism will help in the design of audit environments that make the application of an underlying skeptical disposition more likely.

A survey was administered in which 140 postgraduate auditing students responded to the Schwartz value survey to measure the relative importance of different values, and the Hurtt trait skepticism scale to measure trait skepticism. The relative importance of the ten values was regressed against trait skepticism.

This study finds that the importance placed in the values of tradition and power, relative to other values, is negatively associated with levels of trait skepticism.

The use of postgraduate auditing students as participants may limit the generalizability of the study’s findings.

Qualified by the need for future research to test the generalizability of the findings to an audit practitioner sample, the results of this study suggest that auditors with higher levels of trait skepticism may experience negative affect in environments that emphasize values of power and tradition. To the extent that current audit environments emphasize tradition and power, the results may help explain why trait skepticism is not consistently reflected in audit judgments and actions.

The affective implications of the environment within which auditors exercise professional skepticism is emerging as an important area by which to understand and improve audit quality. By identifying the values that those with a high skeptical disposition place relatively less importance in, this study informs an understanding of the circumstances where an underlying skeptical disposition is more or less likely to be reflected in auditor judgments and actions.

This paper aims to investigate the relative importance of audit-team and audit-firm attributes in perceptions of audit quality by two groups of users of audit services: audit committee chairs/members (“insiders”) and financial analysts/fund managers (“outsiders”).

Using a survey questionnaire, data are gathered from 39 audit committee chairs/members and 42 financial analysts/fund managers and analysed using adaptive conjoint analysis.

The findings reveal that both groups perceive audit-team attributes as relatively more important than audit-firm attributes. This is consistent with expectations for “insiders”, but inconsistent with expectations for “outsiders”. Differences are also found in the internal ratings of some of the attributes, with “insiders” and “outsiders” placing different relative importance on some attributes.

The usual set of limitations that are present in a survey method also apply in this study, i.e. surveys rely on reports of behaviours rather than observations and are therefore susceptible to measurement error. A further limitation is that, in using adaptive conjoint analysis, the number of attributes that may be included in the survey is restricted and, consequently, the attributes selected may not be comprehensive or fully representative.

The study extends the scope of prior studies by examining the relative importance of audit-team and audit-firm attributes in perceptions of audit quality. In using conjoint analysis, the study makes a unique and innovative contribution by providing direct evidence on the relative importance of attributes in perceptions of audit quality for different users of audit services. The findings have implications for regulators and the accounting profession concerned with improving confidence in corporates and for audit firms in monitoring and promoting the quality of their audit services.

A theater/drama perspective is used to gain insights into the participatory nature of service creation and to assess the relative importance of service elements across service scenarios.

Drama production principles are applied to situations where customers co‐create the service offering. Using a theater arts model, elements in service settings can be delineated into director, lead actor, set designer, scriptwriter, supporting cast member, and/or traditional audience roles. To understand the relative importance of the service provider, the customer, and other service encounter elements, three variations of a service setting (educational services) in which the consumer's participatory role moves from passive to proactive are compared.

As the service context became more participatory‐based, service provider roles significantly decreased in importance rankings while customer roles significantly increased, supporting the paper's hypotheses. The ranking of other service setting elements followed a similar pattern with greater importance being placed on elements as they became more central to the participatory experience.

The model is tested in only one service setting and the procedure for assigning theater roles to a service setting needs further refinement.

By merging theories from theater and services literature, a means of assessing the relative importance of service components across service scenarios is illustrated. Principles in theater arts provide the tactical detail needed to fit service creation elements into analogous roles in a drama setting. The model provides insights on the importance of service creation elements when transitioning from a spectator‐based to a participatory‐based service environment.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the relative importance of four main attributes of food products for consumer’s choice. These are price, taste, environmental friendliness and healthfulness, tested across hedonic and utilitarian food products (milk and ice-cream). The weighting of attributes involved in food choices is a complex phenomenon, as consumers must consider contradictory requirements when making their choices. Consumers’ decision-making processes might also be influenced by food category. Some food products are mostly consumed for pleasure, whereas others are consumed because of their nutritional value.

The study employs a choice-based conjoint technique, which addresses how consumers make trade-offs across a set of product attributes.

The results indicate that price and taste attributes are rated as the most important for both hedonic and utilitarian food products. However, when the authors group consumers according to their product preferences, the relative importance of product attributes changes. Specifically, the importance of environmental friendliness and healthfulness is much higher among the health-conscious and environmentally conscious segments than for other segments.

To the knowledge, this is the first study comparing the importance of this combination of product attributes (price, taste, calorie content and eco-label) across hedonic and utilitarian foods in a choice-based conjoint setting. Moreover, a new way of grouping consumers according to their ethical-value profiles enables the authors to create a psychographic description of these segments, and to relate it to their food attribute preferences.

This study aims to examine the environmental attributes relevant to older people's preferences for neighbourhood open spaces. It also aims to explore the association between the relative importance of different environmental attributes and personal and social characteristics in a sample of older people covering a range of geographic locations in the UK.

Choice‐based conjoint analysis (CBC) was used to obtain responses from a sample of 237 older people (60 years +) living in the UK. A total of 13 environmental attributes were identified from earlier qualitative and quantitative studies. Participants were asked to choose a preferred park from a pair of hypothetical neighbourhood parks differing on four of the attributes presented in a questionnaire. The questionnaire included 14 such tasks.

The results suggest that older people preferred a neighbourhood park which is without nuisance, has cafes and toilets, many trees and plants, light traffic en route, wildlife to watch, and is well maintained. Analyses also reveal that whether or not people live alone, and their functional capabilities in getting around, make a difference in the way they place importance on attributes.

The findings can assist those involved in designing and managing outdoor environments to identify salient environmental attributes and prioritise interventions aimed at improving access to, and use of, outdoor spaces for older adults. The approach aids understanding of what is likely to maximise preference and use of open spaces in different segments of the older population.

Conjoint analysis procedures are some of the best tools available for determining importance or relative value of attributes of complex environments from the user point of view. The CBC analysis has been employed for the first time in this study to explore the relative importance of such attributes of open spaces for older adults.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel method to analyse dynamic interactions of stakeholders to explain how a set of agents can act by considering the power/influence positions.

A novel mathematical application uses the importance of characteristics algorithm in combination with composition max-min to compare, group and order information according to the importance of its characteristics. The mathematical application is focused on a strategic analysis, evaluating stakeholder dynamics through power relationships.

The results show a comparison of the relationships among each of the stakeholders to obtain the relative intensity and importance of relationships between them, given by the fuzzy matrix FRInM and the fuzzy matrix FRIM, respectively. This application provides a useful tool for a dynamic analysis of stakeholders in a complex environment, where the best approach to performing a strategic analysis process is sought.

The main implication of the proposed approach is taking into account the importance of information to establish the boundaries and relationships of each characteristic according to its intensity. However, limitations are due to the nature of this research, based on theoretical assumptions regarding stakeholders and the use of a hypothetical example to show the operation of algorithms.

The primary advantage of this proposition is that it takes into account the importance of information to establish the relationships among the characteristics according to their intensity. In addition, it performs multiple comparisons among each characteristic of the information. The interests and opinions of decision makers can be parameterised. A mathematical application shows how each interest group could be classified and related according to subjective information.

This paper reports a study that was carried out to obtain comprehensive performance ratings to gauge the productive and service quality performance of a public transit company using a recent performance measurement method called operational competitiveness rating (OCRA) analysis. The computed ratings incorporate the cost and revenue efficiency of operations, quality of service experience as perceived by commuters, and the quality of service delivery in specific areas measured internally. The ratings reflect the strategic priorities the company assigns to the financial and customer service implications of its operations. We demonstrate OCRA’s use as a diagnostic tool to examine a series of scenarios to construct performance profiles corresponding to different managerial priorities.

This paper seeks to investigate the reasons why, in an increasingly competitive health care milieu, patients choose certain hospitals over others. It introduces the modified importance‐performance analysis technique and presents the method and findings of an empirical study which applied importance‐performance analysis in a health care setting. The strategies derived from the study findings are discussed.