Economic theory states that “free market” competition naturally achieves lower prices—thereby increasing efficiency and benefiting society. This is the first paper in the literature to use means testing to statistically analyze electricity prices, from 1970-2011, for states that...

The electric power industry is moving away from a regulated utility model, toward a deregulated marketbased model—thereby intending to improve system efficiency by reducing generation costs and customer prices, while at the same time improving capital expenditures and service reliability....

The goal of this paper is to test if the promised U.S. electrical system high reliability standards are being maintained, once states deregulate their electric utilities. This research is the first in the literature to combine states that offer retail choice, by deregulating their electric...

The literature on organization design has been dominated by descriptive models in its dealing with structure and operations. This paper takes an alternative view advocating the use of a normative model to be used in the design of service organizations. This model sees the extent of customer...

This research provides an empirically derived measurement model for customer contact, a widely used construct in service management. The model was created by applying two psychometric scaling techniques, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) and the method of paired comparisons, and Content Analysis,...

No abstract available.

Delivering high quality service during the service encounter is central to competitive advantage in service organizations. However, achieving such high quality while controlling for costs is a major challenge for service managers. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for...