Abstract Department Stores are highly interpersonal communicated in the service industry. Products and services should be delivered through the service employees. In the process of interaction with customers , service employees could deliver the expertise of products and services , discover what is customers need , offer them appropriate services and then build the long term relationship with them. So service employees play very important roles in building long term relationship with customers. In reviewing literatures about relationship marketing and purchase intension, previous researches use¡urelationship quality¡vas the mediator mostly to discuss the relationship between relationship marketing and purchase intension, or In the surveys of this study, this research study wants to find how service employees expressions affecting the customers perceived relationship benefits and reach the purposes as below: 1.Discussing the salespersons¡¦ expertise could positive affect the customers perceived relationship benefits. 2.Discussing the interpersonal communication between service sales and customers could positive affect purchase intension. 3.Discussing the customers perceived relationship benefits could positive affect purchase intension. 4.Discussing if relationship benefits play as the mediator between interpersonal communication ¡Bsalespersons¡¦ expertise and purchase intension. Structural Equation Modeling is used in this research. The followings are four points of conclusions¡G 1.Salesperson¡¦s expertise positive affect the confidence benefit and social benefit. 2.Interpersonal communication between service employees and customers positive affect confidence benefit¡Bsocial benefit and special treatment benefit. 3.Confidence benefit and social benefit positive affect customer¡¦s purchasing intension. 4.Confidence benefit¡Bsocial benefit are mediators between interpersonal communication¡Bsalespersons expertise and customers purchasing intension. The conclusions of this research could offer department stores to develop appropriate customer relationship strategies and have great improvement in their business.

In order to survive in the competitive environment and keep substantial development for business, more and more organizations pay attentions to the concept that human beings are the important capital in the organizations. In this case, trying to understand and improve employees¡¦ satisfaction and need, and keeping a good relationship with employees to improve employees¡¦ productivity are the very important issues today for many organizations. Salespersons, who act as the organization impression, and responsible for sales performance and business target, do play a very important role in an organization. Accordingly, how to motivate salesperson to achieve organizational business target is undoubtedly important today. Besides improving salespersons¡¦ professional competence, the leadership style of line managers is thought to significantly influence the salespersons¡¦ performance. The leadership style of line managers, is the independent variable, job performance as dependent variable, and job satisfaction and organizational commitment are moderators in this study. Accordingly, we are going to discuss the relationship between leadership style of line managers and salespersons¡¦ performance. Moreover, the mediating effect of job satisfaction and organizational commitment between leadership style of line managers and employees¡¦ performance will be analysed in this study. The result is stated as below: 1. The relationship between leadership style and salespersons¡¦ job performance: First, the result indicates that the transformational leadership of line managers is positively related to the salespersons¡¦ job performance, which implies the higher level of transformational leadership the line managers have, the higher level of job performance the salesperson can reach. Second, the result indicates that the contingent reward leadership of line managers is positively related to salespersons¡¦ job performance, which implies that the higher level of contingent reward leadership the line managers have, the higher level of job performance the salesperson can reach. 2. The mediating effect of salespersons¡¦ job satisfaction between the leadership style of line managers and salespersons¡¦ job performance. First, the salespersons¡¦ job satisfaction mediates the relationship between line managers¡¦ transformational leadership and salespersons¡¦ job performance. Second, the salespersons¡¦ job satisfaction mediates the relationship between line managers¡¦ contingent reward leadership and salespersons¡¦ job performance. 3. The mediating effect of organizational commitment between the leadership style of line managers and salespersons¡¦ job performance. First, the salespersons¡¦ organizational commitment mediates the relationship between line managers¡¦ transformational leadership and salespersons¡¦ job performance. Second, the salespersons¡¦ organizational commitment mediates the relationship between line managers¡¦ contingent reward leadership and salespersons¡¦ job performance.

Diversas formas de interação entre consumidor e vendedor podem ocorrer durante a prestação do serviço no varejo. Os vendedores buscam por locais de trabalho que os valorizem e propiciem o desenvolvimento adequado do serviço ao consumidor, assim garantindo a qualidade na interação com o cliente. Os clientes, por sua vez, possuem cada vez mais informações para sua decisão de compra, e buscam por varejistas que entendam seu perfil e necessidades, além de vendedores que atendam suas expectativas durante a venda. Entre eles as interações no varejo podem ocorrer através da abordagem, comunicação e atendimento, distância e contato físico, interação com a loja e outros participantes, e variam de acordo com os diferentes perfis e culturas. A complexidade dos comportamentos e preferências desses agentes, aliado à evolução do mercado, e aos poucos estudos no assunto, tornam relevante compreender como esses agentes interagem no ambiente do varejo, especificamente no segmento do surfwear, que é o objetivo desta pesquisa. Para tal propósito a revisão da literatura abordou os seguintes tópicos: o ambiente de serviços, a variável humana no ambiente de serviços e os tipos de interação entre vendedores e consumidores no varejo. Foram observadas 40 interações entre os consumidores e funcionários da loja, e realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas com 31 clientes e 10 vendedores envolvidos no momento do serviço. Os dados foram coletados em três lojas pertencentes ao mesmo varejista nas cidades de São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro e Porto Alegre. Os principais achados sugerem que as interações não possuem uma sequência lógica de acontecimento, mas indicam que em relação à abordagem, os consumidores frequentemente são abordados na entrada da loja, e quanto ao atendimento e comunicação, eles valorizam ser chamados pelo nome e a qualidade do conteúdo presente no discurso do vendedor. Na distância e contato físico, preferem manter uma distância social dos funcionários, sem muito toque ou contato, e na interação com a loja, são mais detalhistas com relação ao ambiente e interagem pouco quando há foco na compra, assim como não se preocupam quando percebem que há outras pessoas no mesmo ambiente. Por fim, foram discutidos os principais achados de acordo com a literatura consultada, propostas ações de melhorias para os varejistas do segmento e sugeridas pesquisas futuras para maior compreensão dos fatores identificados neste trabalho. / Various forms of interaction between consumer and seller may occur during the provision of service at retail. Salespeople are looking for workplaces that value and conducive to the proper development of customer service, thus ensuring the quality of customer interaction. Customers, in turn, have more and more information for their buying decision, and look for retailers who understand their profile and needs, as well as vendors that meet your expectations during the sale. According to the literature review, the retail interactions can occur through the approach, communication and attendance, distance and physical contact, store interaction and other participants, and may vary according to the different profiles and cultures. The complexity of the behaviors and preferences of these agents, together with the evolution of the market, and few studies on the subject, make it important to understand how consumer and salesperson interact in the retail environment, specifically in surfwear segment, which is the goal of this research. For this purpose the literature review addressed the following topics: the service environment, the human variable in the service environment and the types of interaction between salespeople and consumers at retail. 40 interactions between consumers and store employees were observed and conducted semi-structured interviews with 31 customers and 10 salespeople involved at the time of service in three stores belonging to the same retailer in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre. The main findings suggest that interactions do not have a logical sequence of events, but indicates that consumers are often approached in the store entrance, value when they are called by name and the quality of content in the discourse of the salesperson, prefer to keep a social distance of employees without much touch or physical contact, are more detail oriented with respect to the store environment and usually do not realize when there are other people in the store. Finally, we discussed the main findings according to the literature, as well as proposed improvement actions for the segment of retailers and suggested future research for greater understanding of the factors identified in this study.

In this thesis, we consider multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems. We address two main topics. We first address the polynomially solvable cases of the Traveling Salesperson Problem and the Bottleneck Traveling Salesperson Problem. We consider multiobjective versions of these problems with different combinations of objective functions, analyze their computational complexities and develop exact algorithms where possible. We next consider generating extreme supported nondominated points of multiobjective integer programming problems for any number of objective functions. We develop two algorithms for this purpose. The first one is an exact algorithm and finds all such points. The second algorithm finds only a subset of extreme supported nondominated points providing a worst case approximation for the remaining points.

This study is one of the first studies to fully address the relationship that business-to-business buyers have with both the selling firm and salesperson within an integrated model. Finding from this survey research support 14 of the 26 original hypotheses and the 2 additional linkages using structural equation modeling. This study finds that the relationship customers have with the selling firm is a stronger predictor of continuance than the relationship that the buyer has with the salesperson. While this relationship is stronger between the buyer and the selling firm, findings suggest that the salesperson can have a direct negative impact on the relationship if conflict is present. Overall, this study provides a framework for future research on the topic of business-to-business buyer-selling firm and buyer-salesperson relationships.

The advent of the Internet, the influx of technology comparison shopping, and the evolvement of channels have increased the knowledge base of the consumer to the point where some scholars claim the multichannel consumer has more knowledge and control than the salesperson. Selling to a customer who has the control is a challenge for retailers and their sales forces. The purpose of this research is to examine the underlying decision process of the multichannel consumer and the impact of the retail salesperson. This present study tests a conceptual model that suggests multichannel consumers' perceptions of information asymmetry lead to perceived control and purchase intention. Based upon the model, the salesperson's new role is to motivate purchase intention by using adaptive selling to affect the consumer's perception of information asymmetry and perceived control. Using a scenario-based methodology tested with a sample of 307 multichannel consumers, the current investigation examined the impact of: (1) information asymmetry on the consumer's perceived control, (2) perceived control on purchase intention, (3) perceived control as a mediator between information asymmetry and purchase intention, (4) adaptive selling behavior on the consumer's perception of information asymmetry, and (5) adaptive selling behavior on the consumer's purchase intention. The findings revealed that if the multichannel consumer perceives an advantaged information asymmetry then perceived control and purchase intention will be impacted. Adaptive selling behavior affects the consumer's perceptions of information asymmetry but not perceived control. These findings can be used to help managers devise techniques to support the salesperson's ability to secure the sale with the multichannel consumer.

In multi colony ant algorithms several colonies of ants cooperate in finding good solutions for an optimization problem. At certain time steps the colonies exchange information about good solutions. If the amount of exchanged information is not too large multi colony ant algorithms can be easily parallelized in a natural way by placing the colonies on different processors. In this paper we study the behaviour of multi colony ant algorithms with different kinds of information exchange between the colonies. Moreover we compare the behaviour of different numbers of colonies with a multi start single colony ant algorithm. As test problems we use the Traveling Salesperson problem and the Quadratic Assignment problem.

本研究旨在探討銀行消費金融業務績效獎勵制度中，升遷制度及獎金制度對於業務人員績效表現的影響，同時探討業務人員個人背景對於績效表現的差異性。研究方法以個案分析法，藉由個案銀行業務人員實際的業績資料分析，深入了解各項激勵制度的設計對於業務人員績效表現的影響，以及各類不同背景的人員在績效表現上的差異。本研究的主要發現如下： 1.藉由升遷制度的設計，可以有效激勵業務人員發揮更高的工作績效。 2.獎金制度的設計，對於業務人員績效表現的影響： (1)調降獎勵門檻，對於激勵業務人員績效提升的效果不佳；而縮減獎勵總額，獎金的激勵效果降低，業務人員的績效表現變差。 (2)利用定額目標獎勵的方式，讓業務人員容易感受到領取獎金的價值，激勵業績達成的效果明顯。 (3)獎金率調降，業務人員認為投入－產出比率與過去不相等產生失望，績效表現下滑；給付頻率較長的遞延性獎金，無法有效提升業務人員的業績產出。 (4)手續費收入獎金的設計，可以增加業務人員向客戶爭取洽收手續費的誘因，以爭取獎金。 3.不同個人背景在績效表現上的差異：(1)男性業務人員的平均業績達成高於女性業務人員，(2)年齡在26至30歲的業務人員業績達成表現較佳，(3)未婚業務人員業績表現優於已婚的業務人員，(4)學歷愈高在業績的表現上有愈好的趨勢，(5)無工作經驗及曾任職銀行的業務人員業績表現較佳，二度就業的業務人員則相對表現較差。 / The primary purpose of this study is to explore how the work performance of consumer banking sales is affected by promotion programs, bonus programs, personal background and work experiences. A case study approach is applied to study the work performance of salespersons in a large-scale bank. The empirical results of this study are stated as follows： 1.Promotion programs can motivate salespersons to create higher performance. 2.Details of the influence of bonus programs includes: (1) lowering the threshold of paying bonus can hardly motivate salespersons to improve outputs. Reducing the amount of incentive can deteriorate the capacity of a salesperson, (2) the fixed amount of bonus for certain target makes salespersons feel the value of incentive easily, so that they can reach a higher level of performance, (3) the decline in bonus rate can reduce the performance of salespersons because of unequal input-output ratio. On the other hand, deferred payments of bonus can not motivate salespersons to increase outputs. (4) Fee income bonus can boost incentives for salespersons to charge more fees for customers. 3.The salesperson’s performance can be affected by personal background: (1) performance of male salespersons is superior to that of female ones, (2) the 26 to 30 year old salespersons reach higher level of performance, (3) unmarried salespersons perform better than married ones, (4) salespersons with higher education degrees tent to deliver higher performance, (5) salespersons without work experiences and the ones who have served in other banks perform better. However, salesperson of re-employment perform relatively poor.

Bakgrund: Studien har undersökt hur köpbeslutsprocessen och det fysiska mötet ser ut i bilhandeln samt om det finns skillnader mellan hur kvinnor och män upplever köpbeslutsprocessen inom bilhandeln. Studiens ämne valdes på grund av att det gjorts tidigare studier inom bilhandeln gällande köpbeslutsprocessen, men att det finns en brist sedan det digitala mötet kom in i bilden. Det har även genomförts flera studier om skillnader mellan mäns och kvinnors skillnader i köpbeteende, men det finns inga som studerar om skillnaderna ser likadana ut i bilbranschen. Forskningsfråga: Studiens huvudfråga lyder: Hur interagerar bilhandeln med kunden i köpbeslutsprocessen genom det fysiska säljmötet för att det ska leda till försäljning av bil? Studiens underfråga lyder: Skiljer sig bilköp åt för män och kvinnor och i sådana fall på vilket sätt? Syfte: Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur bilhandeln kan arbeta vid köpbeslutsprocessen i förhållande till det fysiska säljmötet och vad som gör att kunden genomför ett köp av bil.Vidare är syftet att studera om det finns några skillnader mellan män och kvinnor vid köpet av bil och om det finns, på vilket sätt skiljer de sig. Metod: Den här studien har en kvalitativ undersökningsmetod och ett abduktivt angreppssätt. Resultatet i studien bygger på 12 semistrukturerade intervjuer med respondenter spridda över Sverige. Slutsats: Studien har visat att köpbeslutsprocessen är oförändrad, i sin struktur, av den digitala närvaron. Däremot ser det fysiska mötet annorlunda ut då säljaren behöver inleda med att ta reda på hur långt kunden kommit i sin köpbeslutsprocess. Studiens underfråga har medfört resultat som visar att kvinnors och mäns evolutionära roller byter plats inom bilindustrin då det är män som uppskattar att handla mer hedonistiskt och kvinnor mer funktionellt. / Background: The study has examined how the buying decision process and the physical meeting work in car sales and whether there are differences between how women and men experience the buying decision process in the industry. The subject of the study was chosen due to the fact that there are previous studies in car sales regarding the buying decision process, but that there has been a shortage since the digital meeting came into the picture. There have also been several studies on differences in buying behaviour between men and women, but there are no studies regarding whether the differences look the same in the car industry. Research question: The main question of the study is: How does the car sales interact with the customers in the buying decision process through the physical sales meeting in order for it to lead to sales of a car? The study´s sub question reads: Do car purchase differ for men and women, and in such a case how? Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate how car sales can work in the buying decision process in relation to the physical sales meeting and what makes the customer to purchase a car. Furthermore, the aim is to study whether there are any differences between men and women in the purchase of a car and, if there is, how they differ. Method: This study has applied a qualitative method and abductive approach. The results of the study are based on 12 semi-structured interviews with respondents spread across Sweden. Conclusion: The study has shown that the buying decision process is unchanged, in its structure, of the digital presence. However, the physical meeting looks different as the seller needs to start by finding out how far the customer has come in the buying decision process. The study's sub question has resulted in results that show that women and men's evolutionary roles change places in the automotive industry as it is the men who appreciate to buy more hedonic and women more functionally.

During initial business-to-business encounters, salespeople try to enhance buyers’ future interaction intentions. A common belief is that increasing buyers’ similarity perceptions increases the chances of future interaction. This study assesses the impact of the similarity-attraction effect on future interaction. By synthesising social psychology and marketing literature, a conceptual framework is proposed, in which perceived similarity influences salesperson trust. This relationship is mediated by task-related and social assessments of buyers. Task-related assessments comprise willingness (benevolence and integrity) and competence (power and expertise). Social attraction is conceptualised as likeability. Salesperson trust drives anticipated future interaction, together with organisational trust and anticipated added value. The conceptual framework was empirically tested through a cross-sectional survey. Dutch professional buyers assessed recent initial sales encounters. A sample of 162 dyads was analysed, using PLS-SEM, including FIMIX segmentation. This study demonstrates support for a third willingness construct: willingness behaviour. This construct implies that buyers are more influenced by expectations regarding behaviour, than assessments of salespeople’s attitudes. A homogeneous analysis supports the influence of perceived similarity on salesperson trust, both directly and through willingness behaviour. However, model-based segmentation uncovers a segment of cost-oriented dyads and a segment of more profit-oriented dyads. In cost-oriented dyads, there is no significant direct effect between perceived similarity and salesperson trust, and willingness behaviour nearly fully mediates this relationship. In more profit-oriented dyads, the similarity-attraction effect is not present. Theoretical and methodological contributions and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.