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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether agreement between frontline employee self-ratings and supervisory ratings of service performance functions as an indicator of healthy supervisor-subordination relationships above and beyond what might be indicated simply by either supervisory ratings or self-ratings.

Research hypotheses were tested using a sample of 220 matched pairs of frontline service workers and their immediate supervisors from nine full service hotels in the USA.

The results show that higher levels of agreement in service performance ratings between employees and supervisors is associated with higher levels of leader-member exchange (LMX) and organizational commitment.

Senior managers can refer to the level of performance rating agreement between customer service employees and their supervisors in assessing supervisors’ competency to manage their work relationship with their subordinates.

This study examined rating agreement in a service performance context and found rating agreement between subordinates and their supervisor may have a unique effect on service worker effectiveness, producing a unique incremental effect on LMX and organizational commitment. This is important given that few attempts have been made to examine service performance from both subordinates’ and supervisors’ perspectives and the implication that rating agreement may have for improving employee service performance.

Customer-intensive services refer to the service that a provider needs to invest in customers with high patience and experience. Within a certain rate range, the slower service rate and the longer service time, the higher customer’s utility; however, this may cause queue congestion. And the advertising of service provider will affect the revenue. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of advertising on the optimal price, service rate and the optimal revenue of such service provider at different development stages.

This paper investigates the service strategies of service provider based on advertising effects. The authors first divide service provider into insufficient customers or sufficient customers according to the development stage, then analyze the impact of advertising at different stages. The authors focus on the formulation of the optimal price, service rate and the optimal revenue of service provider at different stages.

This paper finds that in the insufficient customers stage, the service provider’s strategy of “small profits but quick turnover” is conducive to quickly accumulating customers. With the development of service provider, the advertising indirectly increases the revenue of service provider by maintaining popularity. The result also shows that with the development of service provider, the initiative of such service market has gradually been mastered by service provider, from “buyer market” to “seller market.”

The finding provides an alternative explanation for the impact of advertising on service provider’s optimal strategies; it also solves the settings of service price and rate of customer-intensive service provider at different development stages. This study is essential to create the optimal revenue and solve supply–demand conflicts (such as doctor–patient conflict) between service provider and customers.

This paper aims to investigate the optimal price and service rate decisions in a customer-intensive service, where customers’ perceived service quality decreases in the service speed. Customers are assumed to be forward-looking in purchase decision-making and heterogeneous in their reservation utilities. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of customers’ forward-looking behavior and the heterogeneity on the operational decisions in a customer-intensive context.

The service is delivered through an M/M/1 queue system with unobservable queues. Customers are forward-looking in queue joining decisions, where the purchase decisions are made when the expected utility is greater than the reservation utility. The optimal price and service rate decisions are analyzed with both homogeneous and heterogeneous customers, where homogenous customers have the same reservation utility in purchase decision-making, while heterogeneous customers have different reservation utilities, which are captured by a random variable.

The optimal price and service rate decisions with forward-looking customers depend on the customer intensity, potential market size and customers’ reservation utility distribution. The results suggest that customers’ heterogeneity in terms of their reservation utilities affects the optimal decisions, market coverage and the expected revenue. Service providers need to take customers’ heterogeneity and the forward-looking behavior into operational decision-making.

This paper extends previous studies in customer-intensive service and contribute to the service operations management area by explicitly incorporating customers’ forward-looking behavior and heterogeneity in purchase decision-making. Assuming customers are forward-looking and heterogeneous is more realistic and practical. The results highlight that knowing customers’ behavioral characteristics can better improve decision-making in service operations, which is critical for enhancing customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, thus critical to a firm’s success in the market with intensive competition.

This paper aims to understand how guests’ trip purpose and hotel star rating influence the effects of the value for money perceived at hotels and service quality on guest satisfaction and word of mouth (WOM) recommendation.

Using TripAdvisor, 25 Singaporean hotels were randomly selected for the study, which yielded hotel reviews from 2,040 respondents. Hierarchical and logistic regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationships proposed in the study.

Results indicate significant differences between leisure and business guests’ perception of value for money and service quality at hotels with various star ratings. While perceived value for money and service quality were found as significant predictors for both leisure and business guests’ satisfaction and WOM, the effects were moderated by the hotel star rating. Despite the significant effect of hotel star rating on guest satisfaction, the study found no significant relationships between hotel star rating and WOM for leisure and business guests.

The findings suggest that managers in the hotel industry should understand the purpose of guests’ trip and offer services based on their expectations. As the star rating of a hotel creates certain expectations for both leisure and business guests, providing an appropriate level of services and assuring value for money in accordance with the hotel rating contributes to guest satisfaction and WOM recommendation.

This study contributes to the hospitality literature by investigating how hotel star rating moderates the relationship of value for money and service quality on leisure and business guests’ satisfaction and WOM recommendation.

Consumers are inclined to join longer queues due to social interactions in service consumptions. This purchase behavior brings in operational challenges in terms of capacity planning, which affects consumers’ demand, leading to an unstable and fluctuated arrival process. This paper aims to investigate the dynamic characteristics of the arrival process of a service system with boundedly rational consumers whose purchase decisions are influenced by the queue length under social interactions.

Consumers’ bounded rationality is modeled based on the random utility theory. Due to social interactions, the equilibrium queue length and its interaction with the expected waiting time affect consumers’ value perception. The authors first analyze the optimal service capacity decision with or without considering the influence of social interactions in a static setting. They then focus on the dynamic characteristics of the arrival process by a one-dimensional dynamical model in terms of the arrival rate.

This paper finds that the service system can behave chaotic in terms of arrival rate dynamics under social interactions. The results highlight the dynamical complexity of a simple service system due to consumers’ behavioral factors and the influence of social interactions, which may be the critical drivers leading to fluctuated and uneven demand.

The findings demonstrate that due to consumers’ limited cognitive ability and the influence of social interactions, the demand to a service system can be stable, periodic or even chaotic in terms of the arrival process. This study provides an alternative explanation to the observed demand fluctuations in various service processes under the influence of social interactions, which is important for service providers to effectively manage service capacity to achieve a stable service process and improve operational efficiency.

In 1999 the Federal Communications Commission adopted an order granting complete deregulation of the rates for special access service for specific metropolitan statistical areas based on an objective showing that there was potential competition in that market. This was done in an environment where the local exchange carriers (LECs) subject to price caps were earning a rate of return in excess of 22 percent, with the rate of return on an upward trend. By 2002, the average rate of return across all price cap LECs topped 35 percent. The question that is investigated in this paper is whether the price cap LECs have market power in supplying special access service and whether they have taken advantage of this. The data clearly show that this is the case. Given the prevailing situation, there is a clear need to revisit the pricing flexibility order. First, the product market for special access service needs to be more carefully examined. Second, the metrics used to define the potential for competition need to be revamped.

Although research attention has been given to the modelling process for simultaneous demand‐output management in manufacturing systems, little interest has been demonstrated in service organisations despite the fact that such organisations face unique conditions that further complicate the demand‐output management issue. In response to this lack of emphasis, we review the relevant research from both marketing and operations management and present a cost‐effectiveness model for balancing demand and service output.

This paper aims to propose an approach by human and material resources combination to reduce hospitals crowding. Hospitals crowding is becoming a serious problem. Many research works present several methods and approaches to deal with this problem. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge – after a deep reading of literature – in all the proposed approaches, human and material resources are studied separately while they must be combined (to a given number of material resources an optimal number of human resources must be assigned and vice versa) to reflect reality and provide better results.

Hospital inpatient unit is chosen as framework. This unit crowding reduction is carried out by its capacity increasing. Indeed, inpatient unit modeling is performed to find the adequate combinations of human and material resources numbers insuring this unit stability and providing optimal service rates. At first, inpatient unit is modeled using queuing networks and considering only two resources (beds and nurses). Then, the obtained service rate formula is improved by including other resources and parameters using Baskett, Chandy, Muntz and Palecios (BCMP) queuing networks. This work is applied to “Princess Lalla Meryem” hospital inpatient unit.

Results are patients’ average number reduction by an average (in each block) of three patients, patients’ average waiting time reduction by an average of 9.98 h and non-admitted patients (to inpatient wards) access percentage of 39.26 per cent on average.

Previous works focus their studies on either human resources or material resources. Only a few works study both resources types, but separately. The context of those studies does not meet the real hospital context (where human resources are combined with material resources). Therefore, the provided results are not very reliable. In this paper, an approach by human and material resources combination is proposed to increase inpatient unit care capacity. Indeed, this approach consists of developing inpatient unit service rate formula in terms of human and material resources numbers.

In recent years, some peer-to-peer (P2P) service sharing platforms have improved their service quality by setting an entry quality threshold for service providers. Considering consumers' heterogeneous preferences for service quality and commission rate, it is worth studying how to select the commission rate contract for a P2P platform under a predetermined entry quality threshold for service providers.

In this study, the platform's profit-maximizing model is constructed under two proposed contracts: unilateral commission rate contract and bilateral commission rate contract. The optimal entry quality threshold and the optimal commission rate are obtained. This study also explores the impacts of cross-side network externality and service price on a platform's optimal decisions and social welfare.

Results show that it is always advantageous for the platform to adopt the bilateral commission rate contract, which is closely related to the strength of cross-side network externality, service price and quality sensitivity coefficient. Under certain conditions, adopting the unilateral commission rate contract can reduce platform profit and service provider surplus, and improve consumer surplus and social welfare.

This study analyzes the unilateral commission rate contract and the bilateral commission rate contract of the platform, and discusses which contract is beneficial to the platform, consumers and service providers. In addition, this study provides a basis for the operation decision of a P2P service sharing platform and the pricing decision of service providers.

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of three main technologies on converting browsers into customers: impact of review rating (location rating and service rating), recommendation and search listings.

This paper estimates conversion rate model parameters using a quasi-likelihood method with the Bernoulli log-likelihood function and parametric regression model based on the beta distribution.

The results show that a high rank in search listings, a high number of recommendations and location rating have a significant and positive impact on conversion rates. However, service rating and star rating do not have a significant effect on conversion rate. Furthermore, room price and hotel size are negatively associated with conversion rate. It was also found that a high rank in search listings, a high number of recommendations and location rating increase online hotel bookings. Furthermore, it was found that a high number of recommendations increase the conversion rate of hotels with low ranks.

The findings show that hotels’ location ratings are more important than both star and service ratings for the conversion of visitors into customers. Thus, hotels that are located in convenient locations can charge higher prices. The results may also help entrepreneurs who are planning to open new hotels to forecast the conversion rates and demand for specific locations. It was found that a high number of recommendations help to increase the conversion rate of hotels with low ranks. This result suggests that a high numbers of recommendations mitigate the adverse effect of a low rank in search listings on the conversion rate.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the drivers of conversion rates in online channels for the successful implementation of hotel marketing.