In a viral marketing campaign an organization develops a marketing message, and stimulates customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach, and...

This research investigates the specific influence of the emotion of surprise on customer transaction-specific satisfaction. Four empirical studies-two field studies (a diary study and a cross section survey) and two experiments-were conducted. The results show that surprise positively...

Depending on the shopping context, consumers may develop different mental representations of complex shopping trip decision problems to help them interpret the decision situation that they face and evaluate alternative courses of action. To investigate these mental representations and how they...

Telephone waiting times for a commercial service were varied in two different experiments. In the first experiment, the telephone rate was either zero or fixed at Dfl.1.- (approx. $0.40) per minute. Consumer perceptions of waiting times could be described best by a psychophysical power function....

Study 1 investigates the beneficial effects of experiencing pride. Pride was found to have two different effects. First, it increases salespersons' performance-related motivations. Specifically, it promotes adaptive selling strategies, greater effort, and self-efficacy. Secondly, it positively...

Today, Alchian's "Uncertainty, evolution and economic theory" (1950) is hailed by evolutionary economists as a most important piece, which resumed an evolutionary brand of theorizing in economics after the eclipse of the interwar period. On the other hand, Alchian's article is also cherished by...

Several authors have proposed frameworks to help advertisers predict and plan advertising effectiveness. Rossiter and Percy's advertising grid (1997) recommends that the ad appeal should match the purchase motivation or attitude base. They suggest that for utilitarian brands informational...

This paper deals with Case-based Reasoning (CBR) as a support technology for sales promotion (SP) decisions. CBR-systems try to mimic analogical reasoning, a form of human reasoning that is likely to occur in weakly-structured problem solving, such as the design of sales promotions. In an...

We study the performance of Virtual Stock Markets (VSMs) in an institutional forecasting environment. We compare VSMs to the Combined Judgmental Forecast (CJF) and the Key Informant (KI) approach. We find that VSMs can be effectively applied in an environment with a small number of knowledgeable...

Being different from competitors, in a positive sense, is an important asset to organizations. Well-chosen emphasis on distinctive organizational features is very helpful in achieving a superior position relative to rival organizations. However, organizations often claim to be distinctive on...