Three Essays on Customers in Waits.

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Haskayne School of Business: Management

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Haskayne School of Business

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Lin, Yizhe

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Agarwal, James

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Mourali, Mehdi
• Radford, Scott
• Yang, Zhiyong
• McGrath, Daniel

• wait
• consumer behavior

Statement dc:rights

• University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/39627

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/114458