Services under new management: the myth of a fresh start
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the consumer-side effects of “under new management” (UNM) signs. The authors integrate cue-utilization theory and relevance theory to guide hypotheses about the conditions under which these signs are and are not beneficial. Design/methodology/approach Two consumer-based experiments were used to examine the quality and reputation effects of restaurants signaling a management change on potential and existing customers. Findings The results suggest that positive and negative effects are possible. The direction of these effects is contingent upon consumers’ prior experience, type of service (i.e. search/experience) and the relevance of the signal. Research limitations/implications The study is limited to one industry (i.e. restaurants) and examines the effects of market signals on perceived quality and reputation. In addition, this research brought forth the notion of “signal relevance” and suggested that it may be explicitly tied to attributions. However, this assertion must examine multiple signals (relevant/irrelevant) and their contingent effects on consumer perceptions. Practical implications The findings advise businesses to use caution when using signals such as an “UNM” sign, as they appear to have different effects depending on the experience of the consumer with the service and the relevance of the signal. Originality/value This research contributes to the literature on cue utilization theory to understand the effects of marketplace cues on consumer perceptions. It contributes to marketing theory and practice by proposing a model of cue effects based on prior customer experience, type of service and cue relevance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".