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The purpose of this paper is to explore influencing factors that affect the effectiveness of service recovery strategies using social network from operations management perspective. Specifically, the authors study the relationships between social media agent responses to customer complaints, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors investigate the roles of recovery speed and failure severity in the service recovery process using social network platform.

The results are based on 347 mini cases drawn from the Twitter accounts of a sample of airlines. Grounded theory approach is used to conduct qualitative analysis using NVivo 9, a qualitative data analysis program. A conceptual framework was developed, then tested using χ² analysis.

Agent responses that do not require customers to take further initiatives for problem solving have positive effects on customer emotion alleviation and satisfaction. In contrast, responses that provide further directions poses negative effect on service recovery outcomes. There is a strong positive linkage between customer emotion change and customer satisfaction. Surprisingly, the direct effect of recovery speed on customer emotion and satisfaction is not supported by the data. Rather, it plays a moderating role in affecting the relationship between agent responses and customer satisfaction. The qualitative data further reveals the pivotal role of failure severity, one of key service failure attributes.

The authors study service businesses’ recovery strategies using social media. A conceptual framework is developed to link agent responses, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction from the lens of service providers, using an operations-oriented approach. Finding on recovery speed and failure severity reveal that these variables play different roles when service recovery is operated on social media platform as compared to traditional channels. Additionally, relying on tweets as data sources has constrained us from assessing other long-term service recovery outcomes such as loyalty, repurchase intent and word of mouth. The drawback is resulted from the limited information conveyed through tweets, which tends to be short and brief. The study focusses on the airline industry, which limits the generalizability of the findings to other service industries.

The authors highlight the value and potential of service recovery strategies using social network and provide insights for recovery operations where agent responses should be focussing on real time problem solving. The findings support the benefits of empowering social network agents for service recovery operations. Improving recovery speed should be less of a priority as it serves as a qualifier when service recovery is operated via social network. Given the pivotal role of failure severity, it is critical for social network agents to stand in the shoes of the complaining customers, making imminent assessment of the actual failure severity and taking action accordingly in real time. In the meantime, effective communication through social network may help to lower perceived magnitude of failure by customers, which in turn enhance the effectiveness of other service recovery efforts.

This study is the first attempt to investigate the service recovery process using social media from an operations-oriented perspective. The results supports the potentials of employing service recovery strategies using social media.

More and more customers refer to online reviews before making any purchasing decisions thanks to the increasing popularity of social media and online shopping. This phenomenon has caught the attention of business managers who are increasingly aware that online reviews provide great opportunities to connect with current and potential customers. However, both practices and research on online review management from the businesses’ perspective are fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrative framework that includes the key dimensions of an online review management system.

Based on the Grounded Theory approach, the authors conducted a multiple case study by analyzing the interviews with 11 hospitality services.

The authors found that an online review management system should go beyond the current norm of response management to incorporate key dimensions of formality, centralization, specialization, response customization, integration and review analytics.

The study provides a systematic guideline for online review management practices. The framework can be used as a tool for a business to evaluate existing online review management practices and develop/refine its online review management system.

The study contributes to online review management literature by developing a comprehensive framework to understand the structure and processes of online review management. The key dimensions of an online review management system identified in this study provide an initial measurement model for the online review management construct. Furthermore, the study provides a springboard for future empirical validation and refinement of the key factors for effective online review management.

This study is a systematic literature review of crowdsourcing that aims to present the research evidence so far regarding the extent to which it can contribute to organisational performance and produce innovations and provide insights on how organisations can operationalise it successfully.

The systematic literature review revolved around a text mining methodology analysing 106 papers.

The themes identified are performance, innovation, operational aspects and motivations. The review revealed a few potential directions for future research in each of the themes considered.

This study helps researchers to consider the recent themes on crowdsourcing and identify potential areas for research. At the same time, it provides practitioners with an understanding of the usefulness and process of crowdsourcing and insights on what the critical elements are in order to organise a successful crowdsourcing project.

This study employed quantitative content analysis in order to identify the main research themes with higher reliability and validity. It is also the first review on crowdsourcing that incorporates the relevant literature on crowdfunding as a value-creation tool.

Although public‐private partnerships (PPPs) have been used internationally, the New Zealand Government has only recently started to consider using PPPs to deliver public assets and services. However, there is uncertainty about whether the New Zealand Government should actively enter into PPP arrangements. The government lacks a robust decision‐making tool for assisting with choosing alternative procurement methods. PPPs are seen as risky, but innovative procurement options, with obstacles to overcome before they use can become common place. Nervousness about the use of PPPs requires the New Zealand Government to have a thorough understanding of the drivers and obstacles, and also to understand the applicability of international PPP experience to New Zealand. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the drivers and obstacles for adopting PPPs in New Zealand and provide details on how these obstacles might be overcome by using innovative country‐specific solutions.

Semi‐structured interviews with senior industry players and round table discussions are the research methods used.

The research found that the drivers for PPP adoption include acceleration of infrastructure provision, better risk allocation, whole of life cost savings, improved quality of services, access additional revenue sources, benefits for local economic and social development, and improved project scrutiny. The results show that the drivers appear to be more than securing private financing for public infrastructure. Greater efficiency in the use of resources has been emphasised by New Zealand practitioners. With regard to the apparent obstacles, research showed these to be: political, social and legal risks, unfavourable economic and commercial conditions, high transaction costs and lengthy lead time, problems related to the public sector and problems with the private sector. Possible solutions to these obstacles are derived from national and international research and assessed for their applicability to New Zealand.

The paper presents discussion on the concerns expressed by the New Zealand industry about PPPs at strategic, institutional, and industry level. The identified obstacles and suggested solutions provide some initial guidance on how to proceed with PPP implementation in New Zealand. More research needs to be done to understand the various key facets identified here (e.g. tendering process, contractual arrangement, and risk allocation) and their wider effects. The research is based on interviews with a limited number of senior industry respondents, along with the general results of three industry round table discussions. Therefore, follow‐on interviews need to be conducted with private sector partners, sponsors and funding bodies, in order to gain a wider view of the issues under investigation.

The findings of the research are of assistance to decision makers in both the public and private sectors in New Zealand. By understanding the drivers and obstacles for PPP adoption, and posing solutions to these obstacles, the New Zealand construction industry might be in a better position to adopt PPP schemes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the recent viewpoint of classroom teachers and school administration about the role of school librarians, which is lacking adequate studies. The current trend of fast-evolving information and communication technologies (ICT) and the emphasis on enquiry-based learning has increasing impacts on school curriculum and the required library support.

This paper is based on a qualitative analysis of interviews on three practicing secondary school librarians in Hong Kong on three separate occasions to explore a different, richer type of data, in particular new requirements and issues that a questionnaire survey could provide.

The new roles of the school librarians improving teaching and learning effectiveness under this environment include: being information literacy specialists, leading library improvement projects and providing classroom teaching collaboration and support.

This is one of the very few qualitative studies reporting professional practices and changing roles amongst school librarians in Hong Kong. The results of this study are of practical interest to education policymakers, school administrators, practicing school librarians and educators with a vested interest capitalizing on the school library’s potentials to positively affect students’ achievements.

This paper aims to give a brief review on behavioral economics and behavioral finance and discusses some of the previous research on agents' utility functions, applicable risk measures, diversification strategies and portfolio optimization.

The authors also cover related disciplines such as trading rules, contagion and various econometric aspects.

While scholars could first develop theoretical models in behavioral economics and behavioral finance, they subsequently may develop corresponding statistical and econometric models, this finally includes simulation studies to examine whether the estimators or statistics have good power and size. This all helps us to better understand financial and economic decision-making from a descriptive standpoint.

The research paper is original.

The practice of facility management (FM) has been evolving with the rapid development of pervasive sensing technologies (PSTs) such as sensors, automatic identification (auto-ID), laser scanning and photogrammetry. Despite the proliferation of research on the use of PSTs for FM, a comprehensive review of such research is missing from the literature. This study aims to cover the knowledge void by examining the status quo and challenges of the selected PSTs with a focus on FM.

This paper reviewed 204 journal papers recounting cases of using PSTs for FM. The reviewed papers were extracted from Elsevier Scopus database using the advanced search.

Findings of this study revealed that PSTs and FM applications form a many-to-many mapping, i.e. one PST could facilitate many FM applications, and one application can also be supported by various PSTs. It is also found that energy modeling and management is the most referred purpose in FM to adopt PSTs, while space management, albeit important, received the least attention. Five challenges are identified, which include high investment on PSTs, data storage problem, absence of proper data exchange protocols for data interoperability, a lack of mature data processing methods for data utilization and privacy of users.

This paper paints a full picture of PSTs adoption for FM. It pinpoints the promising explorations for tackling the key challenges to future development.

Based on the aerodynamic loads and dynamic performances of trains, this study aims to investigate the effect of crosswinds and raindrops on intercity trains operating on viaducts to ensure the safe operation of intercity railways in metropolitan areas.

An approach coupled with the Euler multiphase model as well as the standard k-ɛ turbulence model is used to investigate the coupled flow feature surrounding trains and viaducts, including airflow and raindrops, and the numerical results are validated with those of the wind tunnel test. Additionally, the train’s dynamic response and the operating safety region in different crosswind speeds and rainfall is investigated based on train’s aerodynamic loads and the train wheel–rail dynamics simulation.

The aerodynamic loads of trains at varying running speeds exhibit an increasing trend as the increase of wind speed and rainfall intensity. The motion of raindrop particles demonstrates a significant similarity with the airflow in wind and rain environments, as a result of the dominance of airflow and the supplementary impacts of droplets. As the train’s operating speed ranged between 120 and 200 km/h and within a rainfall range of 20–100 mm/h, the safe operating region of trains decreased by 0.56%–7.03%, compared with the no-rain condition (0 mm/h).

The impact of crosswind speeds and rainfall on the train’s aerodynamic safety is studied, including the flow feature of crosswind and different particle-sized raindrops around the train and viaduct, aerodynamic loads coefficients suffered by the intercity train as well as the operating safety region of intercity trains on the viaduct.

It is worth mentioning that in supply chain management (SCM), managerial decisions are often based on optimization of resources. Till the early 2000s, supply chain optimization problems were being addressed by conventional programming approaches such as Linear Programming, Mixed-Integer Linear Programming and Branch-and-Bound methods. However, the solution convergence in such approaches was slow. But with the advent of Swarm Intelligence (SI)-based algorithms like particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization, a significant improvement in solution of these problems has been observed. The purpose of this paper is to present and analyze the application of SI algorithms in SCM. The analysis will eventually lead to development of a generalized SI implementation framework for optimization problems in SCM.

A structured state-of-the-art literature review is presented, which explores the applications of SI algorithms in SCM. It reviews 56 articles published in peer-reviewed journals since 1999 and uses several classification schemes which are critical in designing and solving a supply chain optimization problem using SI algorithms.

The paper revels growth of swarm-based algorithms and seems to be dominant among all nature-inspired algorithms. The SI algorithms have been used extensively in most of the realms of supply chain network design because of the flexibility in their design and rapid convergence. Large size problems, difficult to manage using exact algorithms could be efficiently handled using SI algorithms. A generalized framework for SI implementation in SCM is proposed which is beneficial to industry practitioners and researchers.

The paper proposes a generic formulation of optimization problems in distribution network design, vehicle routing, resource allocation, inventory management and supplier management areas of SCM which could be solved using SI algorithms. This review also provides a generic framework for SI implementation in supply chain network design and identifies promising emerging issues for further study in this area.

This paper aims to analyze the internal relationships and tendency of residential energy consumption, income and carbon emissions.

Taking 30 provinces of China as the analysis unit and dividing them into two types of urban and rural consumer groups, the panel data model was built. In addition, panel unit root test, panel cointegration test and panel Granger causality test were also used.

The results showed that there are long-run equilibrium relationships between the three variables, which show the regular tendency in the spatial process. The elasticity coefficients of residential energy consumption and CO₂ emissions vary across the three regions and decline continuously from the western to central and eastern regions. In addition, geographic location is also an important factor on the energy consumption and CO₂ emissions in residential sector.

This paper provides some points for policies on cutting energy use and pollution in residential sector.