The mobile gaming industry continues to face a persistent challenge of high churn rates that undermine long-term player retention and profitability. This study develops a hybrid system dynamics (SD) model that integrates the Bass diffusion framework to examine the systemic impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on adoption and retention dynamics in free-to-play mobile games. AI is endogenized as a dynamic stock that influences multiple reinforcing and balancing feedback loops related to personalization, content quality, word-of-mouth, and churn mitigation. The model is implemented in Vensim® and validated against industry benchmarks. Scenario analyses of five key AI policy levers demonstrate that moderate AI investments strengthen reinforcing loops, leading to sustained player bases and higher cumulative revenue, whereas aggressive scaling activates balancing loops and results in volatility and reduced long-term performance. The simulation reveals clear trade-offs between short-term growth and long-term stability. By offering a simulation-based decision-support tool, this research provides managers with actionable insights for optimizing AI investment timing, marketing allocation, and feature deployment under resource constraints. The proposed SD–Bass hybrid advances management modeling methodologies and offers valuable implications for technology investment decisions in digital business environments.
Abstract Per-capita funding formulas tie each school’s budget to its enrollment through a fixed rule, and a growing literature asks whether such formulas expose some schools to greater financial uncertainty than others. We study year-to-year volatility in per-pupil funding across rural and urban pre-university schools in Romania, using complete administrative records for 5,703 schools over 2017 to 2019. Our central message is methodological: the rural–urban volatility comparison depends on how volatility is measured. By the standard deviation of within-school annual changes, urban schools appear more volatile, with a rural-to-urban ratio of 0.87; but this gap is imprecise once a school-clustered bootstrap quantifies its uncertainty, it is confined to a single year-pair, and it is driven by a small group of urban schools whose large one-year declines reverse earlier one-year increases. By outlier-resistant statistics such as the interquartile range and the median absolute deviation, rural schools are more volatile, with pooled ratios near 1.08 whose intervals lie above one and that place rural above urban in both year-pairs; this excess is, however, modest (about 8 percent) and attenuates to about 3 percent, no longer distinguishable from equality, once common county-level shocks are removed. The reconciliation is that urban schools have heavier tails, much of which reflects transitory offsetting changes, while rural schools show somewhat greater central dispersion. A Bayesian variance-contrast model recovers the same picture: a normal likelihood reproduces the standard-deviation gap, while a heavy-tailed Student-t likelihood places the rural scale above the urban scale with posterior probability 0.99. A cross-sectional dispersion measure gives a ratio near 1.12, but this reflects persistent differences across schools, not temporal volatility. The results caution against summarizing funding stability with a single statistic and suggest attending to both ordinary variation and tail risk, each with its uncertainty.
Competitive intensity is widely assumed to push firms toward higher service quality, yet the strategic conditions under which this pressure actually translates into quality gains remain poorly understood. Drawing on contingency theory, this study examines whether a firm’s differentiation strategy moderates the relationship between competitive intensity and service quality, and specifically tests whether strong differentiation substitutes for, rather than amplifies, the quality-enhancing effect of competition. The study uses survey data from 204 non-manufacturing business units operating in the United Kingdom, drawn from a broader research project on costing systems (data collected September–December 2018). The present analysis addresses a distinct research question and an interaction-form contingency model that was not examined in the original study. Competitive intensity, differentiation strategy and service quality were measured with multi-item, previously validated survey scales. Hierarchical moderated ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used, with continuous predictors mean-centered before the interaction term was formed; heteroscedasticity-consistent (HC3) standard errors were applied as a robustness check, and simple-slope and Johnson–Neyman analyses were used to probe the interaction. Competitive intensity and differentiation strategy were each positively associated with service quality. Contrary to a simple reinforcement account but consistent with a substitution logic, differentiation strategy significantly and negatively moderated the competitive intensity–service quality relationship (b = − 0.094, p = .013; HC3 p = .015). The positive effect of competitive intensity on service quality was strongest among low differentiators and weakened, without fully disappearing across the observed range, among firms with the strongest differentiation commitments. The study contributes to contingency-based strategy research by reframing competitive intensity and differentiation strategy as interacting rather than independent antecedents of service quality, and by providing empirical evidence, from a UK non-manufacturing sample, of a substitution pattern between external competitive pressure and internal strategic commitment as drivers of service quality. Because the design is cross-sectional and based on a single respondent per business unit, the findings should be interpreted as associational rather than causal. Practical implications for managers balancing strategic positioning and competitive response are discussed.
Abstract Immersive virtual reality (iVR) is transforming retail by combining the convenience of e-commerce with the experiential richness of physical stores. Despite growing interest in iVR retail, limited research has examined how design elements collectively shape customer experience (CX). Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this study explores the design factors, motivational drivers, and consumer behaviours that influence CX in iVR shopping environments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 virtual reality design experts, and the data were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings identify five key dimensions that shape CX: user immersion, intuitive interaction, personalization and customization, shopping efficiency, and brand communication and marketing. These insights informed the development of the iVR Shopping Experience Framework, which explains how design touchpoints influence consumer motivations and behavioural responses. By offering an integrated view of CX design in immersive retail environments, the framework provides a foundation for future iVR retail innovation and supports the development of more engaging, trustworthy, and consumer-centred virtual shopping experiences.
This study examines how dupe type influences product attitude and whether funsumer orientation moderates this relationship. A between-subjects experiment was conducted with 184 university students in South Korea, who were randomly assigned to a design-similar or function-similar dupe condition. Product attitude was significantly more favorable in the design-similar condition than in the function-similar condition. Hierarchical regression analysis further showed a significant interaction between dupe type and funsumer orientation. Simple slope analysis indicated that the advantage of design-similar dupes became stronger as funsumer orientation increased, whereas the conditional effect was not significant at a low level of funsumer orientation. These findings extend research on dupe consumption beyond price and functional utility by demonstrating the importance of aesthetic and experiential value. The study also suggests that firms should segment consumers according to experiential consumption tendencies and develop distinctive design experiences without creating consumer confusion or infringing intellectual property rights.
