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Self‐scanning technology is being tested by major supermarket chains as well as other types of retailers across the world, but the success of the new technology from the consumer’s perspective is not yet clear. This study investigates consumer reasons for both using and avoiding self‐scanning checkouts with a view to addressing these practitioner issues. In addition, the study advances theory on consumer motivation and behavior related to technology‐based self‐service in general. Factors driving preference or avoidance of self‐scanning checkouts include attributes of self‐scanners, consumer differences, and situational influences. Reasons for preference of other types of technology‐based self‐service over traditional service alternatives are also explored to determine motivational and behavioral patterns across service contexts. A combination of research methods is used to investigate these issues and offers richer findings than any one method used alone. Implications are discussed for managerial strategy as well as for future research.

This paper aims to examine the benefits of letting customers choose among compensation methods following a service failure. The author is also interested in the role of gender in influencing satisfaction with the compensation method and post‐recovery emotions.

A between‐subjects quasi‐experiment was conducted in addition to a series of pretests.

Findings from this study indicate that women are more satisfied with the compensation when given the opportunity to choose from alternatives than are men. Moreover, women seem to value the act of choosing more than their male counterparts. The findings further suggest that service operators and retailers might benefit from offering the customer a choice between hedonic and utilitarian compensation options as part of the service recovery process. Letting the customer choose his/her preferred recovery option enhances satisfaction with the chosen compensation method, thus somewhat mitigating the ill‐effects of service failures.

This research contributes to understanding of service recovery efforts both from a theoretical and practical standpoint.

The purpose of this study is to hypothesize that cognitive biases such as nostalgia, rosy retrospection, overconfidence, fading-affect bias and prospect theory affect how to serve in the military. The behaviors of those expecting military service and those who have completed the service differ significantly in evaluating the self and social value of the human capital during the military service. This difference corresponds to the predictions of the cognitive-bias literature. The authors test propositions in option framework. This study’s experimental design proposes a novel military system, a hybrid of conscription and voluntary systems. This study’s results are consistent with the hypothesis, option theory and behavioral economics literature.

The purpose of this exploratory research is to determine the consumer's perceptions of negative option marketing (NOM) offers regarding the value and equity of the offer and perceived opportunistic behavior inherent in the offer. In addition, the paper seeks to examine how a negative option offer versus a positive option offer influences consumer intentions to acquire a financial service.

Using the customer database of a full‐service American bank, a survey was sent to demand deposit account holders. A survey then determined perceptions of the offer, perceptions of the bank making the offer, and intentions to purchase.

Between the negative and positive option scenario sub‐samples, there were no differences in perceptions of value or equity, except in perceptions of opportunistic behavior – the negative option offers yielded significantly higher perceptions of opportunistic behavior. Perceptions of value, equity, and satisfaction with the offer were the same across all offers. Satisfaction with the offer significantly influenced satisfaction with the firm making the offer.

A negative option operates in a contractual situation. The current research examined only one contractual situation. For findings to be generalized, the research needs to be replicated in other contractual contexts.

Even though the negative option offers were perceived as more opportunistic than the positive option offer, one of the negative option offers yielded a higher intention to purchase than the positive option. Care must be exercised in using NOM to minimize perceptions of opportunistic behavior.

There is limited literature on negative option marketing. No one has studied the customer perceptions of the strategy, in spite of its popularity.

Housing Options is an independent advisory service for people with learning disabilities, their relatives and housing and care providers. Housing Options wanted to promote the development of opportunities for those with autism, to help those growing up and wanting their own home. A two‐year project has begun with help from the Shirley Foundation, to review need, demand and the range of existing services, look at what services local authorities, providers and families want and provide information and guidance to help with service development.

This paper aims to explore the emergence of digital services in the public library domain via an extensive study of the websites of all Scottish public library services.

In a four‐month period all 32 of Scotland's public library authority websites were visited by a researcher. The goal of the researcher was to record the options available from the library homepages in the following way: role of library in providing page content: content provider or access provider; was the page providing a digital service; what was the audience for the page: adult, child, or not specified; description of page content; and any noted usability issues. Each site was only visited to three levels below that of the initial homepage.

The study found a good standard of innovation in digital services around LMS functions, offering users the ability to keep in control of their borrowing and reserving. In addition there was a consistent set of electronic reference resources subscribed to by multiple libraries, offering high‐quality information both within the library and for library members from their home or workplace. Problems were found with regards to guidance on the usage of these resources, as well as confusion and inconsistency in terminology usage across different library services.

The paper only examines Scottish public library sites, and thus can only claim to be representative of that country. It also can only represent the sites at the time they were examined.

The paper should be of interest to public and other librarians interested in patterns across websites in their sector.

This is the first national study of Scottish public library websites and its findings should be of value as a result.

This article identifies three main trends in service operations. It identifies how these have been applied to service industries in general and to the food service sector in particular. The relationship between these and specific industry sectors is identified. The application and implementation of these trends in food service organisations is discussed in relation to the organisational culture, leadership style and systems that such firms adopt.

This paper aims to offer and examine a conceptual model of tourist innovativeness toward self-service technologies (SSTs) to confirm whether tourists prefer service delivery by SSTs over employees in an offline hospitality environment.

Tourists’ perceived usefulness (PU) of SSTs and need for interaction (NI) with service employees have been taken as crucial mediating variables to examine the effects of perceived ease of use and technology readiness index personality dimensions toward SST and employee-based service adoption.

Findings reveal that both “NI” and “PU” play significant roles in Technology Readiness and Acceptance Model (TRAM) when tourists select one of two service delivery options – SSTs and service employees.

The foremost limitation of the study is its dependence on domestic tourist samples. However, such samples were chosen because tourists comprising these samples tend to use similar service delivery options more, in turn increasing their use of SSTs available in sample hotels.

The study gives a deeper understanding of TRAM with an extremely crucial mediating variable (NI) in an offline service context. It also provides useful insights to service providers and policy makers for developing new strategies and policies to enhance user experience.

This study recommends the usage of numerous SSTs by tourists.

During extensive literature review carried out in this research, no study was found that proposed such an effective framework in an offline service context.

Researchers often debate health service structure. Understanding of the practical implications of this debate is often limited by researchers' neglect to integrate participants' views on structural options with discourses those views represent. As a case study, this paper aims to discern the extent to which and how conceptual underpinnings of stakeholder views on women's health contextualize different positions in the debate over the ideal structure of health services.

The researchers chose a self-standing, comprehensive women's health service facing the prospect of being dispersed into “mainstream” health services. The researchers gathered perspectives of 53 professional and consumer stakeholders in ten focus groups and seven semi-structured interviews, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis.

“Women's marginalization” was the core theme of the debate over structure. The authors found clear patterns between views on the function of women's health services, women's health needs, ideal client group, ideal health service structure and particular feminist discourses. The desire to re-organize services into separate mainstream units reflected a liberal feminist discourse, conceiving marginalization as explicit demonstration of its effects, such as domestic abuse. The desire to maintain a comprehensive women's health service variously reflected post-structural feminism's emphasis on plurality of identities, and a radical feminist discourse, holding that womanhood itself constituted a category of marginalization – that is, merely being at risk of unmet health needs.

As a contribution to health organizational theory, the paper shows that the discernment of discursive underpinnings of particular stakeholder views can clarify options for the structure of health services.

This paper explores the impact of information technology (IT) on service quality in the consumer‐banking sector. It proposes a service quality model that links customer perceived IT‐based service options to traditional service dimensions as measured by SERVQUAL in the context of customer perceived service quality and customer satisfaction. The model also incorporates several variables affecting customers’ perceptions of IT‐based services, and was tested by a structural equation modeling approach using sample data collected from retail bank customers. The results indicate that IT‐based services have a direct impact on the SERVQUAL dimensions and an indirect impact on customer perceived service quality and customer satisfaction. The analyses also show that customers’ evaluations of IT‐based services are affected by their preference towards traditional services, experiences in using IT‐based services, and perceived IT policies.