Title: Service-choice behaviour modelling with latent perceptual variables

Authors: T. Kurosawa, A. Inoue, K. Nishimatsu

Addresses: NTT Service Integration Laboratories, 3-9-11 Midori-Cho, Musashino, Tokyo, Japan. ' Department of Management Information Science, Chiba Institute of Technology, 2-17-1 Tsudanuma, Narashino, Chiba, Japan. ' NTT Service Integration Laboratories, 3-9-11 Midori-Cho, Musashino, Tokyo, Japan

Abstract: This paper presents a new service-choice behaviour model for various types of telecommunications and internet services. We have proposed a framework for analysing service demand, which can be used to simulate scenarios under various assumed conditions. Service-choice behaviour modelling results in a service demand and is a key factor in this framework. Service-choice behaviour models are constructed to give choice probabilities under given conditions, selectable services, and service specifications, for example. In this paper, we focus on the influence of the lack of knowledge and misunderstanding about services. We propose a service-choice modelling with latent perceptual variables. The model for telecommunications services is shown as an application example. We classify latent perceptual variables into three types: functionality, user friendliness, and charge. This paper gives a method to construct a model with latent perceptual variables and its estimation results. It shows that the proposed method improves the goodness of the model.

Keywords: discrete choice analysis; observed variable; latent variables; structural equation modelling; perception; awareness; service choice; choice behaviour modelling; telecommunications services; internet services; service demand; functionality; user friendliness; service charge.

DOI: 10.1504/IJECRM.2008.020409

International Journal of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, 2008 Vol.2 No.3, pp.228 - 250

Published online: 22 Sep 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article