Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, 2020.
This thesis proposal contains three essays on information technology applications
in new service settings. My first essay explores the key determinants
of organizational customer service practice on social media platforms. Based
on the Twitter trajectory of the airline industry, a two-stage model is proposed
to estimate organizational decisions on the social media platform and
social media customer service adoption. The findings suggest that a firm’s
decision-making is subject to the impact of peer influence and consumer
pressure, and these two factors affect the social media platform and customer
service adoptions differently. My second essay examines how brand-level customer
complaints evolve in response to firms’ service intervention on social
media. The findings suggest that more service interventions lead to more
customer complaints, accounting for the customer population growth and
service quality. Moreover, increased complaints are primarily driven by the
awareness enhancement effect. Specifically, customers learn about a firm’s
service availability from their friends and thus are more likely to use social
media for redress seeking. My third essay investigates how telemedicine adoption affects Emergency Room care delivery. Using a large dataset covering
all emergency visits of New York State from 2010 to 2014, we show that,
on average, telemedicine availability in the ER significantly reduces average
patients’ length of stay. We further show that the adoption of telemedicine
leads to a larger reduction in ER length of stay when there is a demand surge
or supply shortage, which suggests that the efficiency gain is partially driven
by the flexible resource allocation.
