Jie Xiong

Service failure is almost inevitable with the intensifying competition in the service market and expectation of heterogeneous customers. The customer–firm relationship can significantly influence customers’ subsequent attitudes and behaviors to the service provider when they encounter service failure. This study proposes a theoretical model to examine how customer-perceived dependence affects their forgiveness toward a service failure in attribution logic. According to an experiment with 138 and a survey with 428 commercial bank customers, we used a multivariate approach to validate our model. The results show that relationship-valued dependence leads to external attribution, which is positively related to customer forgiveness. In contrast, switching-cost dependence leads to internal attribution, which is negatively related to customer forgiveness. The relationship length is a relevant contextual factor that acts as a negative moderating factor. Our study contributes to the service recovery literature by elucidating the underlying process of forgiveness with the presence of the customer–firm dependence relationship.

We examine the role of experienced CEO in the CEO succession and their contributions to the performance of focal firms. We utilize the propensity score matching with difference in differences model to evaluate to what extent experienced CEO succession affects the total factor productivity growth. Based on the analysis of 1,675 listed manufacturing companies in China, results show that experienced CEO in succession significantly improves firms’ TFP. Our analysis demonstrates that, on average, the event of hiring an experienced CEO succession yields a 3.1% increase in TFP improvement compared with nonsuccession firms. This positive effect can be continued for three years. Furthermore, the heterogeneous effect of experienced CEO succession on TFP is shown between different categories of focal firms.