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Abstract:
As service failures are inevitable, firms must be prepared to recover and learn from service failures. Yet, the majority of customers are still dissatisfied with the way firms resolve their complaints. Can learning to reduce service failures reduce customer dissatisfaction, and to what extent are such reductions sustainable? Previous research showed that organizational learning curves for customer dissatisfaction (i) follow a U-shaped function of operating experience and (ii) are heterogeneous across firms. In this paper, I tease out where the U-shaped learning-curve effect and learning-curve heterogeneity originate: service failure or customers' propensity to complain given the occurrence of a service failure. Using quarterly data for nine major U.S. airlines over 11 years, I find that the U-shaped learning-curve effect as well as the learning-curve heterogeneity originates in the propensity to complain. In the long term, reductions in service failure did not translate in sustainable reductions in customer dissatisfaction. Customers' propensity to complain eventually went up. Managing the propensity to complain provides more opportunity for a firm to distinguish itself from competitors.
customer dissatisfaction, learning curve, organizational learning, marketing, service failure, empirical research
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Abstract:
According to Brooks' law for software development projects "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Building on Brooks' law, we argue that complexity increases the maximum team size in software development projects (Hypothesis 1), and that maximum team size decreases software development productivity (Hypothesis 2). We test these hypotheses with a dataset of 117 software development projects conducted in Finland. Hypothesis 1 is supported for two out of three measures of complexity. We also find strong support for Hypothesis 2. In order to mitigate the negative impact of team size on productivity, managers should pay close attention to the logical complexity of software as well as the interfaces to other software.
Project Management, Software Development, Software Productivity, Complexity, Project Team Size
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