1. Background 1.1. Context and purpose of investigation Service quality, customer relationship management (CRM) and new product development are each crucial to the continued, successful functioning of any business.

In this article, the authors first propose a simple model summarizing the key drivers of customer loyalty. Then, on the basis of this model and drawing on key insights from the preceding articles in this issue, they outline a set of issues for further research related to the quality-valueloyalty chain.

In the last decade, marketers have primarily focused on keeping customers. Only recently have they become aware that creating value by cross-selling additional services is also an important aspect of customer relationship management. In this article we investigate how satisfaction and payment equity, defined as the perceived fairness of the price, affect cross-buying at a multiservice provider.

Institutional theorists have long argued that the competitive environment may encourage divergence of management cognition, affecting how managers develop their mental models of competition (Daniels et al., 2002). Different perceptions of the competitive environment may induce changes in the competitive response repertoire (Rivkin, 2000), affecting both the level of competitive responses, i.e. the extent to which a firm carries out competitive responses in a given time period (Young et al., 1996; Ferrier et al., 1999; Ferrier and Lee, 2002) and their variety, i.e. the breadth and innovativeness of the competitive responses chosen (Nayyar and Bantel, 1994; Ferrier and Lee, 2002)

While the prior research suggests that leadership has important influences on IT acceptance and use, there has been little empirical investigation that identifies the specific managerial behaviors associated with adoption success. This study attempts to address this issue by exploring the influence of empowering leadership on knowledge management system (KMS) adoption through its effects on task-technology fit and compatibility