Paradox of choice: The influence of assortment size on customer satisfaction

Recently researchers showed that more choice is not always better. Choosing from large assortments can be overwhelming, raising expectations and decreasing overall level of consumer satisfaction. Author contributes to existing overchoice studies by using real assortment of online stores to find influence of assortment size on customer satisfaction. 90 students participated in the main experiment, where they chose a smartphone case for their friend. Results of the study show that large assortment size leads to higher expectations, higher choice difficulty and higher level of satisfaction. This research does not show overchoice presence and author suggests future studies could focus more on assortment variety and more personal characteristics of consumers, like preference uncertainty.

Questionário de satisfação do utente e do profissional : impacto num laboratório de análises clínicas

RESUMO: Temos assistido a uma evolução impressionante nos laboratórios de análises clínicas, os quais precisam de prestar um serviço de excelência a custos cada vez mais competitivos. Nos laboratórios os sistemas de gestão da qualidade têm uma importância significativa nesta evolução, fundamentalmente pela procura da melhoria continua, que ocorre não só ao nível de processos e técnicas, mas também na qualificação dos diferentes intervenientes. Um dos problemas fundamentais da gestão e um laboratório é a eliminação de desperdícios e erros criando benefícios, conceito base na filosofia LeanThinking isto é “pensamento magro”, pelo que é essencial conseguir monitorizar funções críticas sistematicamente. Esta monitorização, num laboratório cada vez mais focalizado no utente, pode ser efetuada através de sistemas e tecnologias de informação, sendo possível contabilizar número de utentes, horas de maior afluência, tempo médio de permanência na sala de espera, tempo médio para entrega de análises, resultados entregues fora da data prevista, entre outros dados de apoio à decisão. Devem igualmente ser analisadas as reclamações, bem como a satisfação dos utentes quer através do feedback que é transmitido aos funcionários, quer através de questionários de satisfação. Usou-se principalmente dois modelos: um proposto pelo Índice Europeu de Satisfação do Consumidor (ECSI) e o outro de Estrutura Comum de Avaliação (CAF). Introduziram-se igualmente dois questionários: um apresentado em formato digital num posto de colheitas, através de um quiosque eletrónico, e um outro na página da internet do laboratório, ambos como alternativa ao questionário em papel já existente, tendo-se analisado os dados, e retirado as devidas conclusões. Propôs-se e desenvolveu-se um questionário para colaboradores cuja intenção foi a de fornecer dados úteis de apoio à decisão, face à importância dos funcionários na interação com os clientes e na garantia da qualidade ao longo de todo o processo. Avaliaram-se globalmente os resultados sem que tenha sido possível apresentá-los por política interna da empresa, bem como se comentou de forma empírica alguns benefícios deste questionário. Os principais objetivos deste trabalho foram, implementar questionários de satisfação eletrónicos e analisar os resultados obtidos, comparando-os com o estudo ECSI, de forma a acentuar a importância da análise em simultâneo de dois fatores: a motivação profissional e a satisfação do cliente, com o intuito de melhorar os sistemas de apoio à decisão. ------------------------ ABSTRACT: We have witnessed an impressive development in clinical analysis laboratories, which have to provide excellent service at increasingly competitive costs, quality management systems have a significant importance in this evolution, mainly by demanding continuous improvement, which does not occur only in terms of processes and techniques, but also in the qualification of the various stakeholders. One key problem of managing a laboratory is the elimination of waste and errors, creating benefits, concept based on Lean Thinking philosophy, therefore it is essential be able to monitor critical tasks systematically. This monitoring, in an increasingly focused on the user laboratory can be accomplished through information systems and technologies, through which it is possible to account the number of clients, peak times, average length of waiting room stay, average time for delivery analysis, delivered results out of the expected date, among other data that contribute to support decisions, however it is also decisive to analyzed complaint sand satisfaction of users through employees feedback but mainly through satisfaction questionnaires that provides accurate results. We use mainly two models one proposed by the European Index of Consumer Satisfaction (ECSI), directed to the client, and the Common Assessment Framework (CAF), used both in the client as the employees surveys. Introduced two questionnaires in a digital format, one in the central laboratory collect center, through an electronic kiosk and another on the laboratory web page, both as an alternative to survey paper currently used, we analyzed the results, and withdrew the conclusions. It was proposed and developed a questionnaire for employees whose intention would be to provide useful data to decision support, given the importance of employees in customer interaction and quality assurance throughout the whole clinical process, it was evaluated in a general way because it was not possible to show the results, however commented an empirical way some benefits of this questionnaire. The main goals of this study were to implement electronic questionnaires and analyze the results, comparing them with the ECSI, in order to emphasize the importance of analyzing simultaneously professional motivation with customer satisfaction, in order to improve decision support systems.

Young adults' preferences and satisfaction levels in Duty-free shopping in airports

This study aims to explore and understand what young adults’ duty free shoppers (18-26 years old) want and are getting from travel retail shopping on airport environments and to evaluate their satisfaction levels with the service. It has important managerial contributions since it is an important target in a fast growing market. An online survey was conducted with 188 young adults and its results show that young adults’ are somewhat satisfied with the overall service on duty free stores mainly in what concerns quality of the products and physical evidence of the stores. Results also show that the majority of buyers within this segment are price driven and strongly influenced by promotions associated with price reductions, and do not seem very satisfied with respect to that. Keywords: Young

Who uses NHS saúde 24 hotline? Has the user changed over time?

There has been an increase in the use of telephone-based services and internet throughout the years and, therefore, the Saúde 24 Hotline has become an important service in Portugal. This service aims to screen, counsel and refer the patient in order to avoid unnecessary visits to health institutions and also to indicate the most appropriate resource according to the illness. This work has two different questions: the first one examines the determinants of satisfaction that have more influence on the overall satisfaction of the Saúde 24 Hotline users. The second one aims to analyze if the confidence level of the users is increasing over time, measured by following the recommendation. The first study was conducted on a random sample collected from June to October 2014, which was taken from the User Satisfaction Survey. The second approach includes data from January 2008 to December 2014 from the Clinical Data Base of all users who have called the Hotline. Findings suggest that the majority of users are very satisfied with the service and the variables with more impact on the overall satisfaction are commitment and availability from the nurse, adequacy of call duration and quick identification of the problem. The survey indicates that 94% of respondents follow the recommendation and on average people have called the hotline 3 times in the previous year. The results from the Clinical Database show that people who were recommended to go to the emergency room are more likely to follow the advice than the people who were recommended to book routine appointments

A public transport bus assignment problem: parallel metaheuristics assessment

Combinatorial Optimization Problems occur in a wide variety of contexts and generally are NP-hard problems. At a corporate level solving this problems is of great importance since they contribute to the optimization of operational costs. In this thesis we propose to solve the Public Transport Bus Assignment problem considering an heterogeneous fleet and line exchanges, a variant of the Multi-Depot Vehicle Scheduling Problem in which additional constraints are enforced to model a real life scenario. The number of constraints involved and the large number of variables makes impracticable solving to optimality using complete search techniques. Therefore, we explore metaheuristics, that sacrifice optimality to produce solutions in feasible time. More concretely, we focus on the development of algorithms based on a sophisticated metaheuristic, Ant-Colony Optimization (ACO), which is based on a stochastic learning mechanism. For complex problems with a considerable number of constraints, sophisticated metaheuristics may fail to produce quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time. Thus, we developed parallel shared-memory (SM) synchronous ACO algorithms, however, synchronism originates the straggler problem. Therefore, we proposed three SM asynchronous algorithms that break the original algorithm semantics and differ on the degree of concurrency allowed while manipulating the learned information. Our results show that our sequential ACO algorithms produced better solutions than a Restarts metaheuristic, the ACO algorithms were able to learn and better solutions were achieved by increasing the amount of cooperation (number of search agents). Regarding parallel algorithms, our asynchronous ACO algorithms outperformed synchronous ones in terms of speedup and solution quality, achieving speedups of 17.6x. The cooperation scheme imposed by asynchronism also achieved a better learning rate than the original one.

Snakebites as a largely neglected problem in the Brazilian Amazon: highlights of the epidemiological trends in the State of Amazonas

Envenoming snakebites are thought to be a particularly important threat to public health worldwide, especially in rural areas of tropical and subtropical countries. The true magnitude of the public health threat posed by snakebites is unknown, making it difficult for public health officials to optimize prevention and treatment. The objective of this work was to conduct a systematic review of the literature to gather data on snakebite epidemiology in the Amazon region and describe a case series of snakebites from epidemiological surveillance in the State of Amazonas (1974-2012). Only 11 articles regarding snakebites were found. In the State of Amazonas, information regarding incidents involving snakes is scarce. Historical trends show an increasing number of cases after the second half of the 1980s. Snakebites predominated among adults (20-39 years old; 38%), in the male gender (78.9%) and in those living in rural areas (85.6%). The predominant snake envenomation type was bothropic. The incidence reported by the epidemiological surveillance in the State of Amazonas, reaching up to 200 cases/100,000 inhabitants in some areas, is among the highest annual snakebite incidence rates of any region in the world. The majority of the cases were reported in the rainy season with a case-fatality rate of 0.6%. Snakebite envenomation is a great disease burden in the State of Amazonas, representing a challenge for future investigations, including approaches to estimating incidence under-notification and case-fatality rates as well as the factors related to severity and disabilities.

Consumer satisfaction with water, wastewater and waste services in Portugal

While the concept of consumer satisfaction is a central topic in modern marketing theory and practice, citizens' satisfaction with public services, and especially water and waste services, is a eld that still remains empirically rather unexplored. The following study aims to contribute to this area by analysing the determinants of user satisfaction in the water, wastewater and waste sector in Portugal, using a unique survey of 1070 consumers undertaken by the Portuguese Water and Waste Regulator ERSAR. I perform an analysis of the relation between overall service satisfaction and attributespeci c service satisfaction with an ordered logit model. I then explore if subjective consumer satisfaction can be re ected by ERSAR's technical performance indicators. The results suggest that overall consumer satisfaction is driven by consumer's satisfaction with speci c service aspects but unrelated to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Furthermore, I show that there is no monotonic association between ERSAR's technical performance indicators and consumers' levels of satisfaction.

The effect of deforestation on the water cycle in the amazon basin: an attempt reformulate the problem

If widespread deforestation in Amazon results in reduced evaporative water flux, then either a decrease in evaporation is compensated locally by reduced rainfall,or else changed moisture balance expresses itself downwind in the yet undisturbed forest. The question of where rain will occur is crucial. It is suggested that the appearance of clouds and the occurrence of rainout is governed primarily by the interplay of local meteorologic and physical geography parameters with the atmospheric stability structure except for a few well-defined periods when rain is dominated by large scale atmospheric instability. This means that the study of these phenomena (local heat balances,studies on cloud formation mechanism, vertical atmospheric stability, etc.) must be made on the scale of the cloud size, a few tens of kilometers at most.

Aprendizagem baseada na resolução de problemas: uma experiência pedagógica com alunos de um Curso de Especialização Tecnológica

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Ensino de Informática

A multi-criteria decision support system for a routing problem in waste collection

Autor proof

The non-emergency patient transport modelled as a team orienteering problem

This work presents an improved model to solve the non-emergency patients transport (NEPT) service issues given the new rules recently established in Portugal. The model follows the same principle of the Team Orienteering Problem by selecting the patients to be included in the routes attending the maximum reduction in costs when compared with individual transportation. This model establishes the best sets of patients to be transported together. The model was implemented in AMPL and a compact formulation was solved using NEOS Server. A heuristic procedure based on iteratively solving Orienteering Problems is presented, and this heuristic provides good results in terms of accuracy and computation time. Euclidean instances as well as asymmetric real data gathered from Google maps were used, and the model has a promising performance mainly with asymmetric cost matrices.

A taxonomy for the flexible job shop scheduling problem

This chapter aims at developing a taxonomic framework to classify the studies on the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). The FJSP is a generalization of the classical job shop scheduling problem (JSP), which is one of the oldest NP-hard problems. Although various solution methodologies have been developed to obtain good solutions in reasonable time for FSJPs with different objective functions and constraints, no study which systematically reviews the FJSP literature has been encountered. In the proposed taxonomy, the type of study, type of problem, objective, methodology, data characteristics, and benchmarking are the main categories. In order to verify the proposed taxonomy, a variety of papers from the literature are classified. Using this classification, several inferences are drawn and gaps in the FJSP literature are specified. With the proposed taxonomy, the aim is to develop a framework for a broad view of the FJSP literature and construct a basis for future studies.

A decision support system for a waste collection vehicle routing problem

The selective collection of municipal solid waste for recycling is a very complex and expensive process, where a major issue is to perform cost-efficient waste collection routes. Despite the abundance of commercially available software for fleet management, they often lack the capability to deal properly with sequencing problems and dynamic revision of plans and schedules during process execution. Our approach to achieve better solutions for the waste collection process is to model it as a vehicle routing problem, more specifically as a team orienteering problem where capacity constraints on the vehicles are considered, as well as time windows for the waste collection points and for the vehicles. The final model is called capacitated team orienteering problem with double time windows (CTOPdTW).We developed a genetic algorithm to solve routing problems in waste collection modelled as a CTOPdTW. The results achieved suggest possible reductions of logistic costs in selective waste collection.