This dissertation consists of two essays that study the relevant boundary conditions to the relationship between the customer satisfaction and loyalty. Retaining current customers is critical to a firm's performance and has been well-established in the literature. Extant literature tells us that loyal customers are typically less price sensitive, spend more than non-loyal customers, less expensive to retain, and more importantly, provide new referrals through positive word of mouth. In the first essay, drawing from decision justifiability theory, I posit that consideration set size and price-consciousness moderate the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. At higher levels of consideration set sizes, the positive relationship between satisfaction and loyalty is likely to be weakened. However, this two-way interaction effect is seen to impact high and low price-conscious consumers differently. Specifically, I show that satisfied, low price-conscious consumers with higher consideration set sizes will be more loyal vis-a-vis high price-conscious consumers with similar satisfaction levels and set sizes. These theoretical hypotheses are tested in four separate studies. Specifically, I use secondary data and three experimental studies. All my hypotheses including the mediating role of decision justifiability are supported. The second essay investigates the role of satisfaction on loyalty intentions for firms that offer both the product and the product-related augmented services. In the industry that I studied for this question, buying a product requires an extraordinarily high capital outlay; however, the profitability of the firm is dependent on the services offered to the customers. The services market is a very competitive market as well in this industry. So, how should a firm manage this portfolio that includes both products and services? I draw and extend the consumption system model proposed by Mittal, Kumar and Tsiros (Journal of Marketing, 1999). Specifically, I propose a curvilinear relationship for both product and services satisfaction on loyalty intentions and posit synergistic interactions between them. I test this model using longitudinal data spanning five years across multiple countries that were obtained from a multinational company. Analyses reveal support for the proposed hypotheses.

This research is concerned with the pre-implementation evaluation of investments in Information Systems (IS). IS evaluation is important as organisations need to assess the financial justifiability of business change proposals that include (but usually are not limited to) the introduction of IS applications. More specifically, this research addresses the problem of benefits assessment within IS evaluation. We contend that benefits assessment should not be performed at the level of the IS application, as most extant evaluation methods advocate. Instead, to study the dynamics and the interactions of the IS applications with their surrounding environment, we propose to adopt the business process as the analytic lens of evaluation and to assess the impacts of IS on organisational, rather than on technical, performance indicators. Drawing on these propositions, this research investigates the potential of dynamic process modelling (via discrete-event simulation) as a facilitator of IS evaluation. We argue that, in order to be effective evaluation tools, business process models should be able to explicitly incorporate the effects of IS introduction on business performance, an issue that is found to be under-researched in previous literature. The above findings serve as the central theme for the development of a design theory of IS evaluation by simulation. The theory provides prescriptive elements that refer both to the design products of the evaluation and the design process by which these products can come into reality. The theory draws on a set of kernel theories from the business engineering domain and proposes a set of meta-requirements that should be satisfied by business process models, a meta-design structure that meets these requirements, and a design method that provides guidance in applying the theoretical propositions in practice. The design theory is developed and empirically tested by means of two real-life case studies. The first study is used to complement the findings of a literature review and to drive the development of the design theory's components, while the second study is employed to validate and further enhance the theory's propositions. The research results support the arguments for simulation-assisted IS evaluation and demonstrate the contribution of the design theory to the field.