Three Essays on Customers in Waits.
Date
2022-03
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Abstract
Waiting is an important topic that deserves more scholarly examination given its ubiquity, its substantial impact, and its diversity and complexity. This thesis attempts to offer firms potential solutions to waiting issues by investigating customers’ perceptions, thoughts, emotions, intentions, and behaviors in waits. Specifically, I examine customers’ perceptions and responses to waits in the service (Essay 1), customers’ decision-making about waiting for new products (Essay 2), and customers’ intention to delay their redemptions of rewards in loyalty programs (Essay 3). The selection of these three waiting scenarios covers the diversity inherent in waiting issues and yet sharing a commonality of ‘delay’. In the first essay, I propose that customers see service waits as both an inherent component of the service and an extra cost to the service, and I examine how these two perspectives shape customers’ responses to service waits. In the second essay, I found that customers’ decision to wait for the future product could be influenced by whether the product is introduced with an emphasis on hedonic or utilitarian aspect, and I reveal two distinct underlying mechanisms for the effect. In the third essay, I investigate customers’ redemption from the goal theory perspective, and I compare strategic customers, who delay redemptions for larger rewards, to non-strategic customers in the model.
Description
Keywords
wait, consumer behavior
Citation
Lin, Y. (2022). Three essays on customers in waits (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.