Recently, issues of human resource management gradually attract a lot of attention from organizational behavior scholars, thus how to effectively improve service employees’ job attitude and performance to meet the needs of stakeholders is one of the key issues in internal marketing. Based on the perspective of internal marketing, the study transforms the relevant factors applied to maintaining external customer relations into internal employee-oriented factors, so as to increase the understanding of the relationship between internal service recovery and internal relationship quality (IRQ). This study aims to explore (1) whether internal service recovery enhances IRQ; (2) whether internal relationship investment (IRI) positively moderates relationship between internal service recovery and IRQ; and (3) whether effectiveness of internal service recovery differentiates under different exchange relationship (high/low quality leader-member exchange). In this study, a total of 206 Mainland China and 250 Taiwanese participants were collected. In this study, a variance-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was performed to test the proposed hypothesizes and conduct comparative analysis. Empirical results in both samples show that internal service recovery has positive and significant effects on IRQ; internal relationship investment and leader-member exchange (LMX) positively and significantly moderate the relationship between internal service recovery and IRQ. Finally, based on the results, this study provides some discussions, suggestions and managerial implications for future studies in organizational management.

Public–private partnership (PPP) logistics infrastructure projects have become increasingly prevalent globally. Consequently, the effective management of these projects as their concession periods expire presents a crucial challenge for governments, vital for the sustainable management of PPP logistics infrastructure. This study addresses this challenge by focusing on the pivotal post-concession decision: whether the government should self-operate the mature logistics infrastructure or re-delegate its management to a private entity. Our theoretical model, built on a principal–agent framework, first establishes a social welfare baseline under government self-operation and then analyzes delegated operation under symmetric information, identifying efficiency frontiers. Under symmetric information, we find that government self-operation is more advantageous when its own operational efficiency is sufficiently high, irrespective of the private enterprise’s efficiency; conversely, delegating to an efficient private enterprise is optimal only when government operational efficiency is low. We also demonstrate that if the government can directly specify the demand quantity and service level and delegates operation via a fixed fee, the enterprise can be incentivized to align with the social optimum. However, under asymmetric information, potential welfare gains from delegation are inevitably offset by informational rent and output distortion. We further uncover non-monotonic impacts of parameters like the proportion of low-cost firms on social welfare loss and demonstrate how information asymmetry can indirectly compromise the long-term resilience of the infrastructure. Ultimately, our work asserts that delegation is only superior if its potential efficiency gains sufficiently offset the inherent losses stemming from information asymmetry.

This paper investigates a dual-channel retailer’s inventory and pricing integrated decision-making problem over multiple periods. The quantity-sales mode is adopted in the online channel while the unit-sales mode is used offline. The customer demand of each sales channel is stochastic, and depends on visit costs, customer return costs, sales modes and pricing levels. To achieve the long-term profit maximization, the dual-channel retailer needs to optimize the pricing levels of both channels and the ordering quantity. For this problem, we first formulate a stochastic dynamic programming model, and then prove the joint concavity and the supermodularity of the objective function. With these properties, the optimality of the base-stock policy is proved, and the optimum price policy is characterized. Specifically, if the retailer’s optimum stock is neither too low nor too high, both sales channels need to be operated simultaneously, otherwise, only operating one channel is optimal. The online price is invariant with the retailer’s stock level while the offline price is decreasing in the retailer’s stock level. Finally, numerical results show that the quantity-sales mode, dual-channel sales model, and the multi-period dynamic decisions could benefit the dual-channel retailer. In addition, influences of cost parameters on the total profit are verified numerically.

Predicting future promotion information on markdowns, customers can maximize their utilities by deciding when to buy. With this strategic behavior, this paper investigates a downside-risk-averse retailer’s integrated stock and pricing problem using a single case study method. Analyzing effects of the downside risk aversion and strategic customers is our purpose. By exploring a two-phase newsvendor model with a retailer selling to strategic customers, our work determines the downside-risk-averse retailer’s equilibrium ordering level and selling price. On this basis, effects of the downside risk aversion and the strategic behavior on the retailer’s optimum decisions and profit are analyzed. We find that the reverse effect of the strategic behavior can be mitigated by the retailer’s downside risk constraint. We also extend the model to a decentralized supply chain case. It is found that a low (high) downside risk aversion would mean that the supply chain profit in the decentralized case can (cannot) dominate the centralized under some (any) wholesale price contracts when customers are strategic. In addition, for different risk aversions, we also construct contracts to optimize the supply chain profit. Our results will provide reference evidence of making operational management decisions for the downside-risk-averse retailer in the case of strategic customers.