If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Despite the strong intuitive appeal of personalization (through employees or, increasingly, through the use of software applications), relatively little is known about its role in managing service relationships. This study aims to explore the burgeoning area of technology-mediated personalization and its effects on customer commitment to service relationships. Design/methodology/approach -A theoretical perspective based on integrated reviews of service research and relationship marketing is developed and used to guide the exploration of personalization effects with qualitative data. Findings -Personalization is not always good enhancement to service: its effects have contingencies and vary across the categories. Continuity personalization seems to be a promising area for researchers and practitioners.Research limitations/implications -Personalization effects should be rigorously studied. Continuity personalization seems to offer a promising area for future research. Practical implications -The intuitive belief about personalization is probably misleading. Whether or not personalization strategies help service relationships depends on their capacity to generate positive inferences on dimensions of performance, benevolence, and value provision. Out of the three types, continuity personalization offers a promising strategic option for managing ongoing customer relationships if well implemented. Originality/value -The counter-intuitive insights into personalization effects on relationship continuity address issues of theoretical and practical concerns.

Preference stability refers to the objectively measured choice consistency among options with different attribute values in the same product category. We suggest that a consumer's subjectively held belief of preference stability may be an important determinant of response to personalized recommendations. Experimental results confirm that preference stability belief moderates the effect of customization on the evaluation of recommendation accuracy and receptiveness to the learning relationship. Customization will produce stronger effects on accuracy evaluation and receptiveness for subjects with high preference stability belief than for subjects with low preference stability belief. Customers who believe their preferences are stable appreciate customized recommendations more, notice more acutely whether recommendations are customized or not, and are more receptive to the learning relationship when recommendations are customized than when not. Customers who believe their own preferences are less stable do not appreciate customized recommendations as much, are less sensitive to whether recommendations are customized or not, and are not more receptive to the learning relationship even when recommendations are customized. Theoretical and managerial implications of our findings are discussed.

Purpose This study aims to examine the relationship between family business identity disclosure by firms and consumer product evaluations and the moderating impact, if any, of firm size on this relationship. Toward this end, the study seeks to develop a theoretical explanation for how consumers process family business identity information. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative pre-study was conducted to obtain preliminary evidence that consumers’ perceptions of family businesses originate from both family- and business-based category beliefs. A product evaluation experiment, involving young adult subjects, was used to test the research hypotheses, and the experiment data were analyzed using MANOVA. Findings The key finding was that the effect of family business identity disclosure on consumer product evaluations is moderated by firm size. Practical implications This research has implications for businesses seeking to promote their family business identity in branding communications. Originality/value This research provides a theoretical account of why consumers might hold different perceptions of family business brands. The interactive effect of firm size and family business identity information disclosure on consumer product evaluations contributes new insight to family business branding.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is an exploratory study of customers’ “lived” experiences of commercial recommendation services to better understand customer expectations for personalization with recommendation agents. Recommendation agents programmed to “learn” customer preferences and make personalized recommendations of products and services are considered a useful tool for targeting customers individually. Some leading service firms have developed proprietary recommender systems in the hope that personalized recommendations could engage customers, increase satisfaction and sharpen their competitive edge. However, personalized recommendations do not always deliver customer satisfaction. More often, they lead to dissatisfaction, annoyance or irritation. Design/methodology/approach – The critical incident technique is used to analyze customer satisfactory or dissatisfactory incidents collected from online group discussion participants and bloggers to develop a classification scheme. Findings – A classification scheme with 15 categories is developed, each illustrated with satisfactory incidents and dissatisfactory incidents, defined in terms of an underlying customer expectation, typical instances of satisfaction and dissatisfaction and, when possible, conditions under which customers are likely to have such an expectation. Three pairs of themes emerged from the classification scheme. Six tentative research propositions were introduced. Research limitations/implications – Findings from this exploratory research should be regarded as preliminary. Besides, content validity of the categories and generalizability of the findings should be subject to future research. Practical implications – Research findings have implications for identifying priorities in developing algorithms and for managing personalization more strategically. Originality/value – This research explores response to personalization from a customer’s perspective.

Committed donors who keep giving every year are a key asset for nonprofit organizations because they provide a steady funding source and return a higher lifetime value. We distinguish between committed donors who give only one gift per year (single-gift (SG) donors) and those who give multiple gifts in at least some year (multiple-gift (MG) donors). In this paper, we study whether SG donors and MG donors follow different longitudinal patterns of gift-giving in four consecutive years. We theorize that a donor's yearly gift amount is an indication of his or her willingness to give (WTG) to the organization and may be explained in terms of his or her intrinsic willingness to give (IWTG) and extrinsic willingness to give (EWTG) for that year. We test our theory with data from a leading US nonprofit organization and find that SG donors and MG donors would follow different longitudinal patterns:While SG donors and MG donors would start off at a similar level of WTG in year 1 and would both increase WTG in subsequent years, MG donors would record a higher rate of increase than SG donors. IWTG and EWTG would have different relative importance as determinants of the observed yearly giving level: MG donors depend on both IWTG and EWTG whereas SG donors largely depend on IWTG rather than EWTG to determine how much to give in a year.Our findings suggest that different strategies are needed to manage SG donors and MG donors to sustain and grow annual contributions.