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The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical framework explaining the adoption of online insurance claims characterised by infrequent interactions, inherent complexity and risk. It extends the technology acceptance model to include knowledge-related and trust-related beliefs.

The framework is tested with structural equation modelling using data from a survey of 292 customers who made online insurance claims. Findings are further explained through 30 telephone interviews conducted with online and offline claimants.

Previous research in financial services has shown trust to be equally or more important than perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use in forming attitudes towards adopting online insurance applications. The findings of this paper contradict this by showing, at best, a weak relationship between trusting attitude and intention to use the online service. Trust is somewhat meaningful; however, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and technology attitude are substantially more important in an online insurance claims setting.

Contradictory results always beg further research to assure their robustness. Nevertheless, they can also point to a developing trend where trust in the internet channel, per se, is of diminishing importance. Internet and product knowledge are not as pertinent to forming intentions as usefulness and ease of use.

To encourage customers to adopt online applications for a trusted company, all emphasis should be on user friendliness and perceived usefulness of the online interface.

Compared to other channels, consumers are no longer naïve or distrustful of the online channel for interacting with a firm. If they perceive usefulness and ease of use, they will adopt the offered service.

This study aims to understand the performance implications of when a business internationalizes. Many managers take the performance implications of internationalization for granted. Whether seeking a broader customer base or cost reduction through cross-border outsourcing, the overwhelming belief is that internationalization leads to higher profits.

This paper offers a systematic review, content analysis and cross-tabulation analysis of 115 empirical studies from over 40 major journals in management, strategy and international business between 1977 and 2021. Focusing on research settings, sample characteristics, underlying theoretical approaches, measurements of key variables and moderators influencing the multinationality and performance relationship, this study offers a detailed account of definitions and effects.

The findings of this study suggest a tenuous connection between internationalization and performance. No strain of research literature conclusively identifies a consistent direct path from internationalization to performance. The context specificity of the relationship makes general declarations impossible.

Future researchers should recognize that internationalization is a process taking different forms, with no specific dominant form. General declarations are misleading. The focus should be on the process of internationalization rather than on the outcome.

This study contributes to the international business literature by exploring reasons for the inconsistent results and lack of consensus. Through a detailed account of definitions and effects, this paper explores the lack of consensus as well as the identified shapes of the relationship.

This paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD and innovator regarding his personal journey and the commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Hod Lipson, James and Sally Scapa Professor of Innovation of Mechanical Engineering and Data Science at Columbia University. Lipson’s bio-inspired research led him to co-found four companies. In this interview, Dr Lipson shares some of his personal and business experiences of working in academia and industry.

Dr Lipson received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in 1989. He worked as a software developer and also served for the next five years as a Lieutenant Commander for the Israeli Navy. He then co-founded his first company, Tri-logical Technologies (an Israeli company) in 1994 before pursuing a PhD, which was awarded to him from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering in the fall of 1998. From 1998 to 2001, he did his postdoc research at Brandeis University, Computer Science Department, while also lecturing at MIT. Dr Lipson served as Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University for 14 years and joined Columbia University as a Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 2015. From 2013 to 2015, he also served as Editor-in-Chief for the journal 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing (3DP), published by Mary Ann Liebert Inc.

Dr Lipson’s broad spectrum and multi-decades of research has focused on self-aware and self-replicating robots. Dr Lipson directs the Creative Machines Lab which pioneers new ways for novel autonomous systems to design and make other machines, based on biological concepts. In total, his lab has graduated over 50 graduate students and over 20 PhD and Postdocs. Some of these students joined Lipson, in cofounding startups, while others went on to found their own companies. Lipson has coauthored over 300 publications that received over 20,000 citations. He has also coauthored the award-winning book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing and the book Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead. Forbes magazine named him one of the “World's Most Powerful Data Scientists”. His TED Talk on self-aware machines is one of the most viewed presentations on AI and robotics.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical model of narrow and broad market scanning in a service industry, including short‐ and long‐term outcomes.

In a cross‐sectional survey, structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses on a sample of 126 hotel managers in Norway.

Given that services often involve direct interaction between the customer and the provider, customers play a more active role in the service development process. This has ramifications for how service firms scan their environment and, in turn, for incremental and discontinuous innovation. It is found that narrow and broad scanning each affect the new service development process in a unique way. Narrow scanning has a strong positive effect on profitability through incremental service adaptation; broad scanning has a weak but significant effect on profitability through incremental service adaptation, and broad scanning positively influences spin‐off knowledge.

The two greatest limitations of the research, which translate into important avenues for future research, are to develop a better measure of discontinuous innovation, and to test the model in an alternative setting, because hotels are very dependent on locality and surroundings.

When developing services, services managers must distinguish between short‐ and long‐term performance, and how they scan their markets. Adapting to customers to the exclusion of exploring new opportunities threatens long‐term viability.

The paper offers the following advice: as with organizational learning, service firms need to scan their markets by design, not default.

The purpose of this paper is to use psychological theory to improve our understanding of financial advice-taking. The paper studies how a working alliance between financial service customers and advisors affects the advisor's assessment of the financial service buyer's perceived risk preferences, and what role trust plays as a mediating variable.

The paper obtained data by means of a questionnaire that was answered by 375 matched pairs of bank advisors and customers.

This paper explains how the working alliance method – a concept from psychotherapeutic theory – between financial service customers and advisors affects the advisor's understanding of the financial service buyer's perceived risk preferences. The paper also finds that the role of trust is perceived differently by the advisor and the customer. Advisors see that as their clients learn to trust them they lose touch with the customer's perceived risk preferences, whereas customers do not perceive that their trust in the advisor has any relationship to their risk preferences.

This results suggest that advisors lose touch with the risk preferences of trusting customers, and that psychological methods are needed if the advisor should actually understand customer perceived risk preferences.

The paper advances psychological methods in marketing, and provides a partial answer to the difficulties of financial advice giving.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how customers with different relational bonds respond to the same service failure. In particular, the framework to service failure and recovery devised by Fournier and Mick is applied.

To uncover rich emotional and cognitive responses to service failure, in‐depth interviews with eight former and current patrons of an Australian opera were used.

Three types of relationship were identified: satisfaction‐as‐love (SaL), satisfaction‐as‐trust (SaT) and satisfaction‐as‐control (SaC). Each responded to the same failure in different ways. SaL customers had emotional bonds with the product category and thus reaffiremed their loyalty following the failure. SaT customers saw the service failure and inadequate recovery as a breach of the brand's implied promise and thus excited the relationship. SaC customers took charge of the situation, using their status to improve their situation and then defended the brand.

The findings indicate the importance of customizing service recovery strategies, in this case to those customers with the strongest emotional bonds to the brand, not the product class.

This is the first paper to examine how relational customers respond to service failure and identify how different customer‐brand relationships result in different post‐failure reactions and expectations of service recovery.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between foreign market entry modes and hard‐ and soft‐service firms. The paper investigated which foreign market entry modes service firms opt for, and if this is influenced by systematic differences between types of service industries. A secondary purpose is to test the generalizability of the research findings from manufacturing sector to service sector firms.

Our sample consisted of 140 Swedish service firms. These firms were investigated using a mailed questionnaire survey, and logistic regression analysis was used for testing the hypotheses.

The statistical analysis shows that, in general, soft‐service firms are much more likely than hard service firms to choose a high control entry mode over a low control entry mode. Furthermore, as cultural distance increases, the likelihood of this choice increases even more.

The implications are that while hard service suppliers can learn from the experience of manufacturing firms going abroad, soft services are unique. Given the importance for soft‐service suppliers to interact with their foreign customers, they should opt for a high degree of control over their foreign market entry mode. In future research on foreign market entry mode selection in service firms more attention should be given to social processes that exercise control.

The findings enhance knowledge on foreign market entry by service firms.

Most new product development (NPD) studies focus on manufacturer brands; few consider distributor brands. The purpose of this paper to investigate whether NPD processes and outcomes differ between manufacturers and distributors.

Interviews within the grocery industry in Norway and analysis of sales numbers from an AC Nielsen ScanTrack database illustrate that through different NPD processes manufacturers and distributors reach different outcomes.

Distributors differ from manufacturers in the NPD process in several ways: more in‐store interaction resulting in very market‐driven products. They usually outsource technical development, and launch brands with substantially less market communication through fewer marketing channels. Distributors, who mostly develop copycat products of large volume manufacturer brands, have lower failure rates. More surprisingly, the paper reveals that distributor brands achieve faster growth in market share than manufacturer brands when brand concentration is low, and some low volume distributor brands have a higher average retail price than manufacturer brands, indicating that different private label categories exist.

The sample has only three product categories (pizza, juice, and jam). Replication with other categories in other industries would help validate the results. The distributor NPD process and outcomes are still not well understood, and as distributors move into more value‐added products it will evolve, requiring further research.

This is one of the first empirical investigations of differences in NPD processes and outcomes between manufacturer and distributor brands. It also shows the effect of brand concentration on distributor brand growth.

While satisfaction, value, image, and credibility are commonly assumed to drive customer loyalty, there is nevertheless reason to question whether their effects vary across groups of consumers. This paper seeks to explore how individuals with contrasting need-for-cognition (NFC) levels differ in using memory-based information when forming behavioral intentions towards a current service provider.

The authors tested the hypotheses by means of survey data from customers of retail banks, and applied two-group analysis using structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the moderating effects of NFC.

Satisfaction positively affects loyalty for high NFCs, but not for low NFCs. Image is insignificant in both groups. Value positively affects loyalty for low NFCs, but not for high NFCs. Credibility has a positive effect for low NFCs, but not for high NFCs.

The limited sample size affects the power of the test methodology, but Chow-tests of regression models gave similar results. Further research should test the model in other contexts to enhance external validity.

To develop more effective customer strategies, both researchers and practitioners need to understand how different types of consumers attend to and utilize information when forming behavioral intentions. The standard practice of surveying customer satisfaction and loyalty typically requires the consumer to make a memory-based judgment.

Previous research has primarily focused on how consumer demographics moderate satisfaction-loyalty links. This paper includes additional drivers of loyalty, and assesses moderation by a personality trait (NFC) not previously used in satisfaction-loyalty research. The results indicate that a consumer ' s dispositional tendency to think and elaborate (more or less) can bias survey results.

The promise of a charitable contribution on behalf of respondents to mail surveys may prove effective in increasing response rates as well as offering cost and administration advantages. This study refines this type of incentive by investigating the effect of the amount of the charitable contribution and the placement of the incentive offer in the cover letter. The research population is drawn from the industrial sector, an important sector which has been studied far less than consumers.