Generally, service industries require a rapid innovation of service portfolios to gain and maintain a competitive advantage. In this context, service elimination is a tool of portfolio renewal, where customer retention is a strategic priority for companies. This is especially so because service elimination usually causes higher churn rates than an average churn in telecommunications. Thus, customer retention is seen as a major aspect in enhancing service elimination success. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that increase customer churn in the case of service elimination. We use one of the three Hungarian telecommunication Operator's databases containing usage data three months before and after Service elimination in the course of a major service package reform. Contract-related information and demographics of 10 065 customers are used to differentiate between high and low churn factors, taking care of a possible sample selection problem. The results show that in the course of service elimination there is a significant positive relationship between price decrease, tenure, interaction intensity on the one, and customer retention on the other side. Besides these, demographics (age and residence) also play an important role in explaining churn rates during service elimination. Furthermore, we find that a higher monthly fee after elimination increases the customer´s usage intensity. This research aims to contribute both to service elimination, as well as to customer retention literature, by hierarchical modeling of retention and usage during service elimination with practical implications for decision-makers in rapidly innovating telecommunication markets. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

The main objective of the thesis is to find out the level of food services in the selected facilities through comparative analysis. On the base of primary and secondary information will be determined the food cost of selected catering services and its comparison with other catering establishments. A secondary goal is to obtain an overall view of the menu in the selected catering facilities, raw material costs, method of calculation, or the calculation of food cost and to design the appropriate structure of selected food services in terms of attractiveness and optimal food cost. Acquired knowledge enables to convert the created menu into practice and apply as a potential competitive advantage of the catering facility.

The article sets out that argentinean municipalities are legally banned from raising taxes, but are allowed to levy user charges for specific services. Nevertheless, such limitation is overlooked by the municipalities by means of introducing the “ability top ay” principle within the structure of the taxable base of said user charges. The author concludes that such mechanism distorts the user charge, altering its essence, with the result of transforming it into a mere tax, with the resulting violation of the current legislation.The author critically reviews argentinean case law that has given grounds to such a fiscal deviation and –in order to make his point- compares it with jurisprudence registered on this issue by the Supreme Courts of Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. Such comparison evidences that, if argentinean courts were to apply the criteria said of those Supreme Courts, almost every user charge in Argentina would have to be declared unconstitutional. / El artículo expone que los municipios argentinos están legalmente vedados de cobrar impuestos, viendo limitado su poder tributario al cobro de tasas. Sin embargo, en la práctica eluden esa prohibición mediante la maniobra de introducir en su base imponible criterios puros de capacidad contributiva (vgr. el monto de ventas), con total prescindencia del costo de los servicios retribuidos.El autor reseña críticamente la jurisprudencia de los tribunales argentinos, los cuales han convalidado el uso del principio de capacidad contributiva en materia de tasas. También efectúa una comparación con el tratamiento que esta cuestión ha tenido en los máximos tribunales de Perú, Brasil y Uruguay. Dicha comparación deja en evidencia que, de aplicarse en Argentina los criterios uniformemente sostenidos por los tribunales de estos tres países, una parte sustancial de las tasas hoy vigentes en este último país debería ser declarada inconstitucional.