Many companies operate units which are dispersed across different types of markets, and thus serve significantly diverging customer bases. Such market-type dispersion is likely to compromise the headquarters' ability to control its local managers' behavior and satisfy the divergent needs of...

This paper uses the context of online banking to investigate the consequences of using self-service distribution channels to alter customer interactions with the firm. Using a sample of retail banking customers observed over a 30-month period at a large U.S. bank, we test whether changes in...

We empirically document factors that influence how local operating managers use discretion to balance the trade-off between service capacity costs and customer sensitivity to service time. Our findings, using data from one of the largest financial services providers in the United States,...