Najam U. Saqib

Cultural Similarity and National Bias: An Assessment in an International Service Context

ABSTRACT The results of this study confirm that national bias is influenced by the extent of cultural similarity and differences across a countrys regions. Canadian consumers prefer Canadian to non-Canadian service providers, although providers from English-speaking countries are close substitutes. Service providers from Asian and Spanish-speaking cultures, on the other hand, experience substantial negative biases. Furthermore, the extent of national bias differs significantly across Canadian regions—it is highest in Calgary and lowest in French Quebec.

The Role of Service Provider Groups Stereotypes During Service Failures

Previous research has focused on examining how differences between the services provider and the customer, whether demographic or cultural, contribute to service expectations, service quality and service failure (e.g., Baker et al. 2008). However previous research has not examined how stereotypes of the group that the service provider belongs to might play a role during a service encounter. The main purpose of this research is to examine the role of group stereotypes during service failures. More specifically we examine how stereotypes of warmth and competence influence anger and post failure behaviors. This studied adopted a 2 (competence: high, low) ×2 (warmth: high, low) between subjects experimental design. Data was collected via Mechanical Turk, a crowd sourcing website. We find that consumers experience high levels of anger when the service provider belongs to a group characterized by high levels of warmth, and that this anger leads to a desire to retaliate against the service provider. We also find that anger is likely to be experienced towards service providers from groups that are characterized by high warmth and low competence, e.g., the elderly. Finally, we find that the more competent the group of the service provider the more likely that the consumer is to experience anger, because higher levels of competence imply that the cause of the service failure was controllable.

The Interaction Effects of International Service Attributes and Consumer Characteristics on Consumer Preferences: An Ordered Probit Analysis

This study investigates effects of both consumer characteristics and product attributes on consumer preferences in the context of an international air travel situation. The main focus is on investigating the interaction effects of consumer characteristics and product attributes, in addition to identifying the main effects, which has been the primary thrust of much of the literature. Previous research in marketing reported significant interaction effects of product attributes and consumer characteristics on consumers– choice (Cordell, 1991; Johansson, 1985). These interaction effects could provide us further insights beyond just the main effects, which may lead to better segmentation schemes. Thus, this study incorporates both the consumer characteristics and product attributes in a model of brand preferences and proposes the significance of interaction effects of the explanatory variables for consumers– brand preferences. Secondly, we use a more appropriate statistical technique (ordered probit analysis) as opposed to multinomial probit, or logit to test our hypotheses and estimate the models.