Two essays on the service quality driven by new technologies and consumer reactions

Abstract

Companies have heavily invested in new infrastructure to provide better-quality services to consumers. One of the main reasons why they are interested in adopting new technologies is to maximize consumers’ satisfaction from experiencing their services. Despite these investments for improving service quality, consumers do not always positively react to this advancement in the way that companies intend. For example, consumers may feel uncomfortable if there is considerable variation in their experienced quality due to the limited coverage of service with new technologies. In addition, consumers might be reluctant to communicate with artificial intelligence (AI) agents because they think it would be less competent in recognizing their emotions and showing appropriate reactions. Therefore, policymakers and business managers are still unsure how the improvement in service quality driven by new technologies influences consumer behaviors. In addition, it is unclear how this advancement can translate into benefits for companies and strengthen their market power. Given that service quality is a crucial factor for companies to manage and retain their consumers in the long run, they must understand how consumers react to the improvements in their service quality. To this end, this dissertation tackles this issue. Specifically, the first essay examines whether gender stereotype threats, widely known in the fields of management, economics, and psychology, also appear in interactions between human-like AI agents and consumers. The second essay derives the quality-adjusted price indices of mobile telecommunications services for twelve cities in ten countries with broadband LTE wireless internet service using a hedonic pricing model. The findings presented in these two essays provide valuable contributions to various domains of academic disciplines concerning how consumers react to the improvement of service quality driven by new technologies.