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While within-firm service failure and recovery have been studied extensively, the context in which a service failure at one firm “spills over” and provides an opportunity for an external firm (a subsequent service provider) to recover (compensate) a customer has received limited attention. This study aims to examine how the extent of a service failure plays a role in how external firms should shape their recovery efforts, and how customers’ evaluations of the recovering firm and their feelings of unhappiness are affected.

A pretest conducted on MTurk gauged participants’ perceptions of equitability of the external firm’s recovery effort. In the main study, a 3 × 3 between-subjects experiment examined the effects of failure extent and external recovery type on evaluations of the recovering firm and reduced feelings of unhappiness.

It is found that equity judgments remain consistent in the external recovery context; transferred negative affect is able to be mitigate only in low-failure scenarios, and customers’ evaluations of the external firm increase only in high-failure scenarios.

The use of hypothetical scenarios, as opposed to the employment of a field study, is the primary limitation of the study.

This research finds that external firms can reap the benefits of another firm’s service failure by offering no-cost recoveries, rather than ones that carry some form of cost.

This article aims to examine the online buying behavior among a group of Internet users. Based on a sample of over 3,700 Internet users, this study explores their information‐seeking patterns as well as their motivations and concerns for online shopping. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were used to classify the respondents into six types of online shoppers. Coupled with their demographic information and actual buying behavior, it was possible to constitute a distinct profile for each of the segments. Discriminant analysis was also conducted to seek out the important attitudinal variables that differentiated the various clusters of online shoppers. The implications of such classification are also discussed.

Perceptual maps and trees are widely used for business applications like advertising development, product design and product positioning. Maps and trees are however intrinsically different in terms of how well they can represent consumer perceptions of product‐market structure. Draws on recent advances in the academic literature to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of maps and trees. This theoretical evaluation is used to develop a grid‐based framework which is then used to provide guidelines to managers about what kind of visual representation to use, and what type of input data to collect, for some different real‐life marketing tasks. This conceptual framework is also used to indicate directions for future academic research in the area of visual representation models.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key antecedents of attitude towards electronic deals (e-deals) and factors influencing purchase intention of e-deals. Specifically, perceived value and price consciousness will be tested as antecedents of attitudes towards e-deals. Attitudes towards e-deals, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control are proposed to have strong influences upon purchase intention. The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) provides the theoretical underpinning of the conceptual framework.

Data were collected through convenience sampling. Overall, 611 valid responses of 780 distributed surveys were collected. Only 426 e-deals users were analysed by using structural equation modelling to test the hypotheses.

It is found that perceived value is a strong predictor of attitudes towards e-deals. Another finding also indicates that attitudes towards e-deals and normative influence positively affect consumers’ purchase intention towards e-deals.

Practitioners are advised to integrate social media (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) and online communities to approach the “leader” to influence new potential consumers to purchase e-deals. It is also important to maintain the good value of e-deals and emphasise the huge benefits of using e-deals to persuade consumers to purchase it.

The originality of this study lies in extending the TPB as a robust measurement to investigate online shopping behaviour in the context of e-deals.