Consumer Service Industries Research Articles

Simulating inter-city population flows based on graph neural networks

Inter-city population mobility, a critical phenomenon in the modern urbanisation process, is closely related to urban industrial structure and socioeconomic development. This paper aims to investigate the dynamics of population flows and their intricate ties to industrial structure, so we employ the graph neural networks (GNNs) method to simulate inter-city population flows in China, which efficiently integrates demographic and socioeconomic data with Tencent migration big data while accounts for geographical relationships between cities. The results show that the model’s predictive accuracy using the CPC index was high for road and rail traffic and moderate for air transportation. A comparison with real-world data verified the model’s effectiveness in predicting the urban hierarchy and regional aggregation of flows. Using GNNExplainer, the results indicated that population size positively influenced population flow, while developed manufacturing reduced population mobility for road and rail traffic but increased it for air transportation. By conducting scenario simulations in Northeast China, we found that enhancing the region’s industry and consumer service industry could mitigate negative population outflows. The conclusions drawn from this study offer valuable perspectives to policymakers and urban planners, enabling them to make well-informed and judicious choices concerning urban planning, transportation, and resource allocation.

In companies we trust: consumer adoption of artificial intelligence services and the role of trust in companies and AI autonomy

PurposeCompanies utilize increasingly capable Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to deliver modern services across a range of consumer service industries. AI autonomy, however, sparks skepticism among consumers leading to a decrease in their willingness to adopt AI services. This raises the question as to whether consumer trust in companies can overcome consumer reluctance in their decisions to adopt high (vs low) autonomy AI services.Design/methodology/approachUsing a representative survey (N = 503 consumers corresponding to N = 3,690 observations), this article investigated the link between consumer trust in a company and consumers' intentions to adopt high (vs low) autonomy AI services from the company across 23 consumer service companies accounting for six distinct service industries.FindingsThe results confirm a significant and positive relationship between consumer trust in a company and consumers' intentions to adopt AI services from the same company. AI autonomy, however, moderates this relationship, such that high (vs low) AI autonomy weakens the positive link between trust in a company and AI service adoption. This finding replicates across all 23 companies and the associated six industries and is robust to the inclusion of several theoretically important control variables.Originality/valueThe current research contributes to the recent stream of AI research by drawing attention to the interplay between trust in companies and adoption of high autonomy AI services, with implications for the successful deployment and marketing of AI services.

Opening of high-speed rail and the consumer service industry: Evidence from China

This paper studies the impact of high-speed rail (HSR) on the consumer service industry. Using data from 291 prefecture-level cities in China for the 2003–2019 period, we show the following: First, the opening of high-speed rail causes a 8.38% increase in consumer service employment. Second, it is found that the promotion effect of high-speed rail on the consumer service industry is mainly reflected in three industries: the wholesale and retail industry; the accommodation and catering industry; the culture, sports and entertainment industry. Third, we find that the city heterogeneity in the effect of HSR. The opening of HSR increases employment within the large cities’ consumer services sectors. Our findings demonstrate that transportation infrastructure has an obvious employment effect, which will not only affect the tradable sector but also promotes the growth of the non-tradable sector.

The Impact of Urban Rail Transit on Industrial Agglomeration Based on the Intermediary Effects of Factor Agglomeration

Urban rail transit is an important form of infrastructure for a city or even a country. This paper uses location entropy to measure the industrial agglomeration level of cities at the prefecture level or above in China from 2006 to 2018 and empirically tests the mechanisms of urban rail transit construction, factor agglomeration, and industrial agglomeration. The empirical results show the following: (1) the construction of urban rail transit infrastructure has a significant positive effect on the agglomeration of the labor force, capital, and technological innovation; (2) urban rail transit construction effectively induces agglomeration in the urban manufacturing industry and consumer service industry; and (3) the impact of urban rail transit construction on agglomeration in the urban manufacturing industry and consumer services industry is primarily due to the intermediary effects of factor agglomeration. The results show that gradually improving the urban rail transit network, strengthening the construction of comprehensive rail transit hubs, and optimizing capital allocation within urban rail transit allow for the full utilization of urban rail transit construction in promoting industrial agglomeration.

Sector-level evaluation of China’s CO2 emissions: Trend evolution and index ranking

In China’s low-carbon development progress, industrial sectors play a crucial role in reducing CO2 emissions and maintaining economic growth targets. Because the Chinese government is promoting industrial structure transformation for “high-quality economic development,” the dominant CO2 emitters have changed in recent years. It is important to identify the trend evolution of industrial CO2 emitters and implement targeted measures and policies for CO2 emission control at the sector level. In this paper, a hybrid input–output model is adopted to assess the situation and trend of sectoral CO2 emissions from 2002 to 2017 in China. Demand-side drivers of sectorial embodied CO2 emissions are discussed. Based on the embodied CO2 emission decomposition of 27 sectors, a CO2 emission evaluation index is defined for CO2 emission ranking and key sectors for embodied CO2 emissions are identified. For the key CO2 emitters, we provide targeted policy suggestions for CO2 emission mitigation from the perspective of trend evolution and index ranking.The results indicate the following. (1) 2015 is a turning point for China’s CO2 emission mitigation progress, because the previously increasing embodied CO2 begins to decrease from 2015 to 2017. (2) Although the Construction sector stimulates a large amount of CO2 emissions at present, the major driving forces of CO2 emissions have gradually changed from infrastructure construction to the increasing demand of consumer goods, service industry, and export of technology-intensive products. (3) The CO2 emission intensity of the Electric Power and Heat Supply sector has increased, and promotion of renewable energy consumption is urgently needed. (4) From the demand-driven aspect, tertiary industry has greater CO2 emission potential than heavy industry.

Consumer Service Industry Agglomeration, Income Level and Skill Premium

This paper empirically tests the influence of consumer service industry agglomeration on the income level and skill premium of Chinese workers by using the survey data of Chinese residents' income. It is found that the agglomeration of consumer service industry has a significant role in promoting the overall income level of residents in China, but it has an additional effect on the income level of skilled workers, which increases the skill premium. The agglomeration of consumer service industry can only significantly improve the income level of labor earners and produce the effect of skill premium in labor earners. The agglomeration of consumer service industry has significantly increased the income level and skill premium of coastal workers than that of inland areas. For this, should encourage laborer to coastal big city collect.

The Low-end Locking Condition of Chinese Industrial System and Its Unlocking Paths: An Empirical Study Based on Correcting Distorted Urbanization Perspective

The relationship between economic development and social structural evolution is a projection of the paradoxical movement of productive forces and productive relations in social-economic field. After the reform and opening-up policy, China has been experiencing two significant revolutions in its economic field and social field respectively: one is the industrialization which leads to Chinese Economic Miracle, and the other is urbanization which helps to achieve the feat that five hundred million people civilized in just thirty years. However, when we re-examine this thirty-year construction and development process with quality-oriented perspective, the compression of time dimension exposes many problems in industrial development and urban construction, which mainly present as the low-end locking industrial system and the distorted urbanization. In this paper, we take the main line that distorted urbanization is one of the deep-seated social structure factor of Chinese low-end locking industrial system, and expand Chinese distorted urbanization into three dimensions: motivation distortion—the land urbanization problem, body distortion—the peasant-worker urbanization problem, and function distortion—the urban disease. We also expand Chinese low-end locking industrial system into two sectors: the secondary industry’s low-quality and the tertiary industry’s lag behind, and then we build the three dimensions—two sectors” analytical framework. Based on this framework, we analyze the low-end locking condition of Chinese industrial system by applying stylized facts and evaluation index, and then we give a discussion on the path selection of correcting distorted urbanization to unlock its low-end locking industrial system by building a PLS-SEM model. The results indicate that: (i) Chinese secondary industry’s low-quality present as the hindrance of structure evolution and the tardiness of efficiency promotion, and its tertiary industry’s lag behind present as the producer service industries’ insufficient ability in assisting production and the consumer service industries’ insufficient ability in guaranteeing consumption. (ii) Optimizing local financial and taxation system will lower the level of land urbanization and then generate unlocking effects to Chinese urbanization’s motivation distortion; improving the skill education for peasant-workers and reforming Chinese household registration system to narrow the gaps between peasant-workers and local workers will lower the level of peasant-worker urbanization and then generate unlocking effects to Chinese urbanization’s body distortion; reinforcing urban infrastructure construction, improving urban public service’s supplying and distribution, and optimizing the administrative process will lower the level of urban disease and then generate unlocking effects to Chinese urbanization’s function distortion.

The relationship between remuneration and financial performance for companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange

Background: The executive directors of a company are the agents of the shareholders and should manage the company in the best interest of the shareholders, not only for personal gain. It is therefore important for companies to ensure that they implement remuneration policies which will result in motivated employees who will execute decisions and actions which are in the best interest of the shareholders. However, it is widely acknowledged that the relationship between company performance and executive remuneration is weak. This implies that executives are still rewarded excessive remuneration regardless of the performance of their companies. Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine whether a relationship exists between the performance-based remuneration of executive directors and the financial performance of South African companies. Setting: The study was conducted in South Africa, specifically on companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Methods: The study design was quantitative and made use of a Pearson correlation and generalised least squares regression with bootstrapping at a 95% confidence interval to analyse the relationship between executive director remuneration and the financial performance of 42 companies in the consumer goods and services industry of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) from 2006 to 2015. Results: The study established that the remuneration policies in place for South African executive directors within the consumer goods and services industry seem to be affected by the share price of the company. Conclusion: In the South African environment, executive director remuneration is thus not directly related to profitability or company size, as was the case in some earlier studies. The link between executive director remuneration and share performance may be an indication that remuneration policies are based on the share price and are thus directly connected to the principle of shareholder wealth maximisation.

High speed rail and urban service industry agglomeration: Evidence from China's Yangtze River Delta region

High speed rail (HSR) services shorten space-time distances between cities and induce the reallocation of production resources between regions (cities). Based on the data of 25 cities in China's Yangtze River Delta region during 1995–2014, this paper uses the (continuous) difference-in-differences model to investigate the influence of HSR on urban service industry agglomeration. The results show that HSR has a positive effect on the urban service industry agglomeration of the cities located along the rail lines. Compared with cities not located along the rail lines, HSR does not weaken the service industry agglomeration of the medium and small-sized cities that are also situated along the rail lines and around the core city. The service intensity of HSR, which is measured by train service frequency, also exhibits a significant effect on the service industry agglomeration of those cities located along the rail lines. Higher levels of HSR service intensity have a greater effect on urban service industry agglomeration. In addition, we further subdivide the category of service industry into producer service, consumer service, and public service industries. We find that HSR has a significant impact on producer service industry agglomeration, but HSR's influences on consumer service industry and public service industry are insignificant.

The Stories of Software [Bits Versus Electrons

Explores the evolution of computer programming that is being propelled by new ways of software development and engineeirng. Today, there is a lot of interest in teaching people to code as a basic skill. This seems to make a lot of sense in a world that is increasingly being redefined by software. The consumer product and services industry is creating a demand for people with programming skills who can take an idea and turn it into executable code. But the concept of software is much broader and deeper than simply substituting software for gears and levers. It is a way of telling stories and creating agents that can take on a life of their own. The Internet is a byproduct of this new concept. Rather than depending on scribes or telecommunications companies to carry our messages, now we use software to program around those once necessary intermediaries. Mastering the skills and language of programming gives us the vocabulary for understanding how software is rewriting the world. And then, we can begin the conversation about what the author refers to as the "New Literacy".

Agglomeration within an urban area

This paper utilizes a newly created index for colocalization to estimate the determinants of industrial agglomeration within a single urban area. Our new index directly incorporates the location of individual establishments while controlling for the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) in order to create this measure of spatial similarity between two industries. We estimate that proximity to transportation infrastructure and consumers as well as knowledge spillovers largely explain patterns of agglomeration. We find a smaller role for input–output linkages and consumption externalities for retail and consumer service industries.

Service Operations Optimization: Recent Development in Supply Chain Management

Services are the key of success in operation management. Designing the effective strategies by optimization techniques is the fundamental and important condition for performance increase in service operations (SOs) management. In this paper, we mainly focus on investigating SOs optimization in the areas of supply chain management, which create the greatest business values. Specifically, we study the recent development of SOs optimization associated with supply chain by categorizing them into four different industries (i.e., e-commerce industry, consumer service industry, public sector, and fashion industry) and four various SOs features (i.e., advertising, channel coordination, pricing, and inventory). Moreover, we conduct the technical review on the stylish industries/topics and typical optimization models. The classical optimization approaches for SOs management in supply chain are presented. The managerial implications of SOs in supply chain are discussed.

Information Security: Exploring the Association between IT Receptivity and Cyber Crime Victimization

Cybercrime is a menace for all enterprises in the current digital age. Focusing on the consumer and financial services industry for several years, cybercrime definitively made the shift into the working patterns. The organizations are engaged in strong R&D and trying to manage secure transactions between clients and businesses. Although, cybercriminals are operational every moment to craft better strategies to intrude into the corporate networks, that leads to better payoffs. Our study is based on five Information Technology firms offering a range of electronic services globally. The survey based approach is applied to fetch responses from information specialists of the concerned enterprises to explore an association between cyber crime strategies identified.

Advertising, the Media, and Globalization

Advertising is a crucial media industry, not only in its own right but also because of the intermediary structural relation it holds between the commercial media on one hand and the consumer goods and service industries on the other. This can be conceived as a manufacturing-marketing- media complex. However, the traditional business model that facilitated this relationship in the mass media era is now under challenge from the new forms of social communication afforded by the internet. Accordingly, such a fundamental transformation forces a critical review of how advertising has been understood. This essay explains how former approaches such as the semiological analysis of advertisements, the Marxist political economy of value, ethnographic studies of advertising practice, and the “ cultural turn ” in social theory have all been superseded to a greater or lesser extent by the reorientation of advertising within a broader conceptual landscape of consumer culture, and by contemporary theory and research on branding. Furthermore, attention is given to the historical globalization of the corporations that own the brands and the advertisi ng industry’s response, which has been to consolidate into a small number of global umbrella corporations that coordinate and manage a host of specialist divisions across the whole field of “ integrated marketing communications. ”

From ‘free’ to fee: Acceptability of airline ancillary fees and the effects on customer behavior

Businesses in various consumer service industries have begun to unbundle their service offerings by introducing numerous fees for products and services that were previously provided as “free.” Anecdotal evidence in the media indicates that these fees cause widespread public displeasure, frustration, and outrage. This paper develops a framework of fee acceptability, negative emotions, and dysfunctional customer behavior, which is tested using data from the airline industry. Findings identify the strongest effects on betrayal in the case of baggage fees, followed by charges for comfort. Also, betrayal has a direct effect on complaining, whereas anger mediates the relationship between betrayal and negative word of mouth.

Dynamic relationships between industry returns and stock market returns

Different from prior studies which concentrate on the unidirectional impact of industry leading, this study examines the bi-directional dynamical causal relation between industry returns and stock market returns by considering multiple structural breaks for ten major eastern and southern Asia countries. Our results show that finance and consumer service industry returns have significant power in explaining the movements of market returns. Further, we apply logit regressions to explore the determinants of the leading hypotheses and find exchange rate and interest rate are important in explaining the industry–market nexus. In a developed market the industry and the market have feedback relations, but in a highly controlled economy the influence from the stock market dominates.

The Inevitable Application of Big Data to Health Care

THE AMOUNT OF DATA BEING DIGITALLY COLLECTED AND stored is vast and expanding rapidly. As a result, the science of data management and analysis is also advancing to enable organizations to convert this vast resource into information and knowledge that helps them achieve their objectives. Computer scientists have invented the term big data to describe this evolving technology. Big data has been successfully used in astronomy (eg, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of telescopic information), retail sales (eg, Walmart’s expansive number of transactions), search engines (eg, Google’s customization of individual searches based on previous web data), and politics (eg, a campaign’s focus of political advertisements on people most likely to support their candidate based on web searches). In this Viewpoint, we discuss the application of big data to health care, using an economic framework to highlight the opportunities it will offer and the roadblocks to implementation. We suggest that leveraging the collection of patient and practitioner data could be an important way to improve quality and efficiency of health care delivery. Widespread uptake of electronic health records (EHRs) has generated massive data sets. A survey by the American Hospital Association showed that adoption of EHRs has doubled from 2009 to 2011, partly a result of funding provided by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009. Most EHRs now contain quantitative data (eg, laboratory values), qualitative data (eg, text-based documents and demographics), and transactional data (eg, a record of medication delivery). However, much of this rich data set is currently perceived as a byproduct of health care delivery, rather than a central asset to improve its efficiency. The transition of data from refuse to riches has been key in the big data revolution of other industries. Advances in analytic techniques in the computer sciences, especially in machine learning, have been a major catalyst for dealing with these large information sets. These analytic techniques are in contrast to traditional statistical methods (derived from the social and physical sciences), which are largely not useful for analysis of unstructured data such as text-based documents that do not fit into relational tables. One estimate suggests that 80% of business-related data exist in an unstructured format. The same could probably be said for health care data, a large proportion of which is text-based. In contrast to most consumer service industries, medicine adopted a practice of generating evidence from experimental (randomized trials) and quasi-experimental studies to inform patients and clinicians. The evidence-based movement is founded on the belief that scientific inquiry is superior to expert opinion and testimonials. In this way, medicine was ahead of many other industries in terms of recognizing the value of data and information guiding rational decision making. However, health care has lagged in uptake of newer techniques to leverage the rich information contained in EHRs. There are 4 ways big data may advance the economic mission of health care delivery by improving quality and efficiency. First, big data may greatly expand the capacity to generate new knowledge. The cost of answering many clinical questions prospectively, and even retrospectively, by collecting structured data is prohibitive. Analyzing the unstructured data contained within EHRs using computational techniques (eg, natural language processing to extract medical concepts from free-text documents) permits finer data acquisition in an automated fashion. For instance, automated identification within EHRs using natural language processing was superior in detecting postoperative complications compared with patient safety indicators based on discharge coding. Big data offers the potential to create an observational evidence base for clinical questions that would otherwise not be possible and may be especially helpful with issues of generalizability. The latter issue limits the application of conclusions derived from randomized trials performed on a narrow spectrum of participants to patients who exhibit very different characteristics. Second, big data may help with knowledge dissemination. Most physicians struggle to stay current with the latest evidence guiding clinical practice. The digitization of medical literature has greatly improved access; however, the sheer

Understanding Emerging Market Equity Risk Premia: Industries, Governance and Macroeconomic Policy Uncertainty

The average equity risk premium (ERP) in emerging markets is well-known to be significantly higher than in developed markets. But, key reasons for this remain unclear, contributing to investment strategy uncertainty. Here, we use industry-level data for 19 emerging market countries across three regions of the world to first examine the contribution of each industrial stock market to the extra premium paid by emerging markets to international investors from 1995 to present, and then to explore the relative importance of country-level governance and macroeconomic policy uncertainty in explaining both national and regional industry-by-industry ERP behaviour. We conduct separate analyses for the emerging mar- ket crises period of 1995-2002, and the post-crises period of 2003-2012. Based on both static and dynamic approaches, we find that some industries indeed perform consistently better than others. In particular: (i) the healthcare and basic materials industries mostly contributed to the extra premium paid by the Asian stock market; and (ii) the East European and Latin American stock markets’ extra performances were largely driven by the utilities and consumer services industries, respectively. However, our cross-sectional analyses sug- gest that country-level governance indicators are not strongly correlated with either national or industry-level returns, with the exception of the consumer services industry. Lastly, using both rolling-window and DCC-GARCH frameworks, we find that correlations between industrial stock market excess returns and a measure of global economic policy uncertainty are consistently negative, and follow similar patterns. Our empirical evidence as a whole suggests that industrial stock markets are more highly related both within and across countries and regions than has been suggested previously. Contrary to much existing empirical work, our results therefore suggest there is little space in emerging markets to exploit cross- industry portfolio diversification benefits.

Analysis of the moderating role of the gender variable in service recovery processes

In this study, the authors focus on service recovery processes and identify a set of key factors that drive satisfaction with the recovery process, which ultimately leads to customer loyalty. In addition, the authors investigate the role of gender as a potential moderating variable in the recovery process. Using a sample of 202 customers who had experienced a problem with their provider, filed a complaint and received a response from the company, the authors empirically test the proposed framework in the mobile phone market. The findings reveal that men tend to be more demanding when dealing with service providers and less loyal, while women tend to exhibit a more fully-developed sense of justice and greater attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. These results provide valuable insights for the consumer services industry: Companies can use gender information to manage complaints in order to restore customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty more efficiently.

Analysis of the moderating role of the gender variable in service recovery processes

In this study, the authors focus on service recovery processes and identify a set of key factors that drive satisfaction with the recovery process, which ultimately leads to customer loyalty. In addition, the authors investigate the role of gender as a potential moderating variable in the recovery process. Using a sample of 202 customers who had experienced a problem with their provider, filed a complaint and received a response from the company, the authors empirically test the proposed framework in the mobile phone market. The findings reveal that men tend to be more demanding when dealing with service providers and less loyal, while women tend to exhibit a more fully-developed sense of justice and greater attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. These results provide valuable insights for the consumer services industry: companies can use gender information to manage complaints in order to restore customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty more efficiently.