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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of explanation and compensation, as specific accommodative management responses to negative online customer reviews, on potential customers.

The scenario-based online experiment with 306 participants investigates the effects of explanation and compensation on potential customers’ purchase intentions in the hotel segment of the hospitality industry.

The results reveal that combining an explanation with compensation is the most effective management response; providing neither an explanation nor compensation is the least effective. The effects of management responses that entail providing only an explanation or compensation do not differ significantly.

Continued research should investigate the effects of specific accommodative management responses in other service industries and other cultural settings and consider different kinds of explanations and compensation.

Hotel managers in the hospitality industry should reply to negative online customer reviews by combining an explanation with compensation. Service providers that currently lack structures and procedures to identify service failures and their causes or that cannot take corrective actions should provide compensation. Service providers that currently have limited financial resources should provide explanations.

This study analyses the effects of explanation and compensation on potential customers’ purchase intentions. In addressing the effects on potential customers, instead of on complainants, the conceptual framework represents a novel combination of management responses from service recovery research with signalling theory, the search-experience-credence framework and risk reduction methods.

This study examines the impact of mediator style, mediation outcome, and mediator background variables on community mediation participant satisfaction and fairness perceptions along several dimensions. Our data were collected from a community mediation program located in a justice court in the Southwestern United States. During a twelve‐month period, 40 mediation sessions, each involving a single mediator, were videotaped. The 108 mediation participants completed surveys assessing their perceptions of and satisfaction with their specific mediation experiences. The findings indicate important impacts of mediator facilitativeness on all perceptions and of conflict resolution success on satisfaction. Mediator experience impacted perceptions of the mediator; mediator gender and law background had no impacts.

The purpose of this study is to describe the evaluation of a training programme in a Portuguese family’s small and medium enterprise (SME) in the cosmetics industry. This study addresses the four levels of the Kirkpatrick Model and estimates the return on investment (ROI) of a training programme in sales.

The study follows a case design to address the analysis of the training outcomes. This study uses data from 53 employees and explore the programme’s results.

This study provides evidence on the reactions of the trainees to the programme; the learning which results from it; and on the changes in trainees’ behaviours and the consequent results. This study also estimates the ROI of the programme; it is 5.55.

The limitations to this study may be the use of data from a single training programme.

The research results offer managers some critical information in terms of future options in resource allocation. Training managers become more informed in making future choices on where to invest in training programmes.

The originality of the study regards the ROI estimation for an SME’s sales training programme. SMEs are not often addressed in the training evaluation literature. Because SMEs have limited organisational resources, and they do not invest much in training. Further, this estimation requires data gathering and reporting that is not commonly done, even for large firms.