Controlling uncertainty: Why do consumers need to believe in certain service providers?
2012-07-18
(Press-News.org) Consumers evaluate services and make decisions based on the level of uncertainty associated with a product—the greater the uncertainty, the more likely it is they will need to have faith in a company and focus on its unique offerings, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
"Some services can be evaluated with actual experience, whereas other services are difficult to evaluate even with experience—they have to be taken on faith. Services taken on faith are more difficult to evaluate, and are usually perceived to have greater uncertainty and higher risks associated with them," write authors Jin Sun (University of International Business and Economics, China), Hean Tat Keh (University of Queensland), and Angela Y. Lee (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University).
Most products can be evaluated by actual experience. But this is not always true for services. For example, when you are buying a product such as a car, you can take it out for a test drive before making the purchase. But when deciding on a service such as surgery, it is impossible to get a trial operation before deciding on a surgeon; consumers must rely on more nebulous features such as reputation.
The authors found that consumers tend to focus on unique features only when they are evaluating services based on faith and it is the greater uncertainty associated with this type of service relative to services based on experience that undermines consumer confidence and in turn increases the focus on unique versus standard attributes.
"Service providers such as retail banks should focus on improving features that can easily be compared with their competitors. For example, staying open longer or offering more competitive interest rates. As for services such as those provided by insurance companies, the best strategy would be to create innovative and distinctive features such as personalized consulting services," the authors conclude.
###
Jin Sun, Hean Tat Keh, and Angela Y. Lee. "The Effect of Attribute Alignability on Service Evaluation: The Moderating Role of Uncertainty." Journal of Consumer Research: December 2012.
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2012-07-18
Consumers who self-diagnose are more likely to believe they have a serious illness because they focus on their symptoms rather than the likelihood of a particular disease, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. This has significant implications for public health professionals as well as consumers.
"In today's wired world, self-diagnosis via internet search is very common. Such symptom-matching exercises may lead consumers to overestimate the likelihood of getting a serious disease because they focus on their symptoms while ignoring the very low ...
2012-07-18
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– You're headed out the door and you realize you don't have your car keys. After a few minutes of rifling through pockets, checking the seat cushions and scanning the coffee table, you find the familiar key ring and off you go. Easy enough, right? What you might not know is that the task that took you a couple seconds to complete is a task that computers –– despite decades of advancement and intricate calculations –– still can't perform as efficiently as humans: the visual search.
"Our daily lives are comprised of little searches that are constantly ...
2012-07-18
An ice island twice the size of Manhattan has broken off from Greenland's Petermann Glacier, according to researchers at the University of Delaware and the Canadian Ice Service. The Petermann Glacier is one of the two largest glaciers left in Greenland connecting the great Greenland ice sheet with the ocean via a floating ice shelf.
Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering in UD's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, reports the calving on July 16, 2012, in his "Icy Seas" blog. Muenchow credits Trudy Wohleben of the Canadian ...
2012-07-18
Delivering a high-birth-weight infant more than doubles a woman's breast cancer risk, according to research from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The researchers suggest that having a large infant is associated with a hormonal environment during pregnancy that favors future breast cancer development and progression.
Marking the first time that high birth weight was shown to be an independent risk factor, the finding may help improve prediction and prevention of breast cancer decades before its onset.
"We also found that women delivering large babies ...
2012-07-18
Washington, D.C. — Two powerful brain chemical systems work together to paralyze skeletal muscles during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, according to new research in the July 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The finding may help scientists better understand and treat sleep disorders, including narcolepsy, tooth grinding, and REM sleep behavior disorder.
During REM sleep — the deep sleep where most recalled dreams occur — muscles that move the eyes and those involved in breathing continue to move, but the most of the body’s other muscles are stopped, potentially ...
2012-07-18
A community-based nursing program delivered in collaboration with existing health care services is more effective in reducing the number of older people dying from chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, than usual care according to a study by US researchers published in this week's PLoS Medicine.
The authors led by Kenneth Coburn from Health Quality Partners in Pennsylvania in the US, randomized 1736 eligible patients (aged 65 years and over with heart failure, coronary heart disease, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and/or hyperlipidemia who received ...
2012-07-18
A new study published today in PLoS Medicine re-evaluates the role of public reporting of hospital-acquired infection data. The study, conducted by Nick Daneman and colleagues, used data from all 180 acute care hospitals in Ontario, Canada. The investigators compared the rates of infection of Clostridium difficile colitis prior to, and after, the introduction of public reporting of hospital performance; public reporting was associated with a 26% reduction in C. difficile cases.
The authors comment "This longitudinal population-based cohort study has confirmed an immense ...
2012-07-18
In this week's PLoS Medicine, Joseph Tucker from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA and colleagues lay out a social entrepreneurship for sexual health (SESH) approach that focuses on decentralized community delivery, multisectoral networks, and horizontal collaboration (business, technology, and academia).
They argue that while SESH approaches have yet to be widely implemented, they show great promise: "Social marketing and sales of point-of-care, community-based tests for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, conditional cash transfers ...
2012-07-18
A increasingly used type of HIV study which involves switching patients on one type of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to another, to see whether the new drug is as good as the at preventing replication of the HIV virus, may be unethical, according to a new Essay published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The studies, termed non-inferiority trials, are only ethical if participants can meaningfully benefit from the treatment change and are more likely to benefit than suffer harm, according to Andrew Carr from the HIV unit in St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia, Jennifer ...
2012-07-18
High consumption of vitamin E either from diet or vitamin supplements may lower the risk of liver cancer, according to a study published July 17 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Liver cancer is the third most common cause of cancer mortality in the world, the fifth most common cancer found in men and the seventh most common in women. Approximately 85% of liver cancers occur in developing nations, with 54% in China alone. Some epidemiological studies have been done to examine the relationship between vitamin E intake and liver cancer; however, the results ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Controlling uncertainty: Why do consumers need to believe in certain service providers?
