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Contract management is an important activity in public procurement especially on executing development projects while aiming at value for money. On the contrary, reports from the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority show that funds have been wasted due to poor contract management practices hindering value for money achievement. Hence, the study aimed at assessing the contribution contracts management practices towards value for money achievement. Questionnaires and Interviews were used for data collection and findings revealed that contracts contained all the necessary conditions, contracts practices of time management, quality management and costs control were effective and resulted into value for money achievement. Therefore, value for money was achieved above average scale by considering qualitative measures and it was recommended that more efforts are needed to enhance supervision and enforce defect liability clause.

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.

The full text of a new draft guideline on value for money audits is provided. Guidance to auditors on the special factors to be taken into account in the application of auditing standards to value for money audits is offered.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the quality of big data marketing analytics (BDMA) impact the satisfaction, perceived value for money and intentions to reinvest as perceived by marketing managers, i.e. the users of BD.

Survey data was collected with the help of a marketing research company – mainly among Canadian and US marketing professionals with experience in BDMA deployment (N = 236). The structural model was analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling.

Findings indicate that the quality of technology has a significant and positive impact on perceived value for money but not on the satisfaction levels of those who use the data (marketing professionals). Furthermore, information quality is significantly and positively related to satisfaction for marketing professionals – but not the perceived value for money. Both perceived value for money and satisfaction are positively linked to intentions to reinvest in big data.

This paper examined separately the significance of the technology and information quality of BDMA in assessing its importance on user satisfaction and perceived value for money and, ultimately, on intentions to reinvest among marketing managers. It is noteworthy that the users of the BD (marketing managers) appear to be much more critical of BD than the data generators (BD analysts).

The purpose of this study is to investigate the passengers' perception of app or application-based ride-sharing service in Bangladesh. The research directly measures the passengers' perception of perceived quality and value for money of using app-based ride-sharing services in Bangladesh and how it impacts passengers' satisfaction. The study also measures the indirect relationship of perceived quality and value for money and passengers' loyalty through the mediating effects of passenger satisfaction in app-based ride-sharing services.

The authors used an online self-administered survey questionnaire to collect data from the respondents who have experienced app-based ride-sharing services in Bangladesh. In this study, 400 questionnaires were distributed to the respondents online (Google form) and received 281 useful responses that give a 70.25% response rate. The survey data were analyzed based on construct validity, convergent validity and structural equation modeling by using Smart PLS 3.

The research findings indicate that perceived quality and value for money positively and significantly influence passengers' satisfaction. The passengers' satisfaction has a direct and significant relationship with passenger loyalty. The research findings also indicate that perceived quality and value for money have an indirect relationship with passenger loyalty through the mediating effect of passenger loyalty in app-based ride-sharing services.

Both perceived quality and value for money have been the key drivers of passenger satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the ride-sharing service providers should emphasize enhancing passenger value perception and quality service to reinforce passenger satisfaction and loyalty by increasing communication with the passengers about their apps. Besides, the service providers need to keep track of passengers' satisfaction levels and adopt necessary initiatives to ensure satisfied passengers toward loyalty.

Limited studies have investigated the impacts of perceived quality and value for money on passenger satisfaction and loyalty to app-based rideshare service. It is a suitable time as the research findings will help ride-sharing service providers enhance their quality performance to compete healthily. Simultaneously, passengers can enjoy improved, and value-added services due to increasing competition among the app-based service providers. Regulators can also emphasize passenger quality services and the importance of money as a proposition while formulating policy and regulations toward the management of ride-sharing companies.

The amount of expenditure required to scale up smart infrastructure projects is often enormous. Public–private partnership (PPP) is one of the proposed and viable solutions for addressing the financial issues of smart infrastructure projects. However, the most important criterion in choosing PPP over other procurement methods is that the project under the PPP method should deliver the best value for money (VFM) while also including defined economic and social objectives, rather than relying exclusively on efficiency factors. While PPP provides a variety of advantages for developing infrastructure, significant challenges may arise as a result of smart infrastructure initiatives. Diverse PPP approaches have been used to build smart infrastructure around the world, with varying degrees of success. The purpose of this study is to identify the VFM factors that are suitable for smart infrastructure projects and to examine the impact of their interrelationships.

The methodology for this study consisted of three stages: identifying VFM factors in PPP for smart cities based on an extensive literature review, analyzing data from a sample of 90 PPP practitioners using a Likert scale questionnaire and estimating interrelationships among VFM factors using structural equation modeling (SEM).

After performing a SEM analysis on the gathered data, the best fitted measurement model consisted of 11 VFM factors acting as indicators of three latent variables for smart infrastructure projects (clear output specification for measuring performance, efficient dispute resolutions, optimized risk allocation and business models, improved and integrated community services, economic sustainability, appropriate capital structure and collaterals, smart asset management, diffusion of smart technologies, technical innovation, Ince) and three clusters of their interrelations (economic sustainability, integration drive, optimization and smart technology).

This research has resulted in a useful and readily applicable list of factors and clusters of value for money criteria for the implementation of PPP in smart infrastructure projects, assisting public sector management by providing a measure of pre-conditions that can be used as an assessment tool when determining whether a PPP should be used instead of conventional methods.

In addition to the theoretical and methodological contributions, this study produced a usable and readily adaptable list and clusters of value for money factors for the implementation of PPP in smart infrastructure projects.

On the basis of the justice, attachment, social support, self-determination theories, this research paper examines the impact of the student–instructor relationship construct on the customer-centric measures of overall student satisfaction, and perceived value for money and their impact of the behavioral intentions as an endogenous construct. We considered universities as providers of complex services focusing on students' service quality and students as the customers of the higher education institutions.

A survey instrument was used to collect data among undergraduate and graduate business students in a medium-sized Canadian university (N = 178). Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the strength, significance, and effect sizes of the relationships between the key constructs.

The results indicate that the student–instructor relationship is significantly related to student satisfaction and value for money perceptions. Also, the student satisfaction and behavioral intentions, value for money and student satisfaction, and value for money and behavioral intentions relationship were significant.

The perceived quality of student–instructor relationship and its relationship to customer-centric measures like satisfaction, value for money and behavioral intentions has received relatively little attention in previous research and was discovered to be an important contributor to the perceived student satisfaction and value for money. The importance of the student–instructor relationship is further emphasized indirectly via the perceived value for money construct to student satisfaction.

This study aims to present a novel examination of actor value formation (AVF) in the sharing economy by uncovering its key dimensions (i.e. information seeking, personal interaction and feedback) at each stage of Airbnb consumption. Using multi-source data, how the key dimensions of AVF affect consumers’ evaluative judgment capturing the key aspects of consumption experiences (i.e. communication quality, value for money and overall evaluations) was empirically tested.

This study adopted a triangulated, multi-study approach to test and validate the hypotheses. In Study 1, the authors analyzed 586,778 online reviews through deductive and inductive approaches to determine how three AVF dimensions could be captured and examine these dimensions’ effects on consumers’ evaluative judgments. In Study 2, an online survey was adopted to improve the reliability and validity of findings.

This study identified positive and negative outcomes of AVF. The results also revealed which AVF dimensions significantly led to communication quality and value for money, which in turn influenced consumers’ overall evaluations. The findings further provided robust support for the mediating role of value for money as a mechanism in the relationships between AVF and overall evaluations across the two studies.

This study contributes to the literature by empirically identifying the three key dimensions of AVF in each consumption stage and subsequently testing a conceptual model using different data, research methods and analytical techniques to cross-validate the results. The authors also extended the scope of AVF by integrating both positive and negative aspects in the context of Airbnb.

During 1994‐1995, work carried out by the author as Head of Unit for Facilities Management Research at Sheffield Hallam University has opened the way for the creation of a new approach to support service management and contracting that could potentially revolutionize the customers’ ability to ensure value for money from facilities management (FM) internal and outsourced contracts. Introduces the concepts of “living contracts” and “moving specification”, using FM in the UK National Health Service as an example. New management tools and methods based on the approach are currently being implemented in a number of contract situations with very positive early results. Describes some of the principles of the approach. Future work will aim to expose some of the early findings from the field data.

Partnerships are the British government’s preferred method of procuring public sector services, and the policy is usually justified in terms of delivering value for money. Ex ante financial methodologies are prescribed to ensure that decision making is based on a sound appraisal of alternatives and the government has called for an evaluation of implemented projects. This paper seeks to contribute to that evaluative process by exploring ex post facto some of the issues and problems that arose in practice. Using a case study approach, the paper considers two failures of information technology partnerships to examine how risk transfer, which is at the heart of the partnership policy, works in practice. The cases show that the contracts failed to transfer risk in the way that had been expected. The public agencies, not the commercial partner, bore the management risk and costs fell on the public at large and/or other public agencies.