Yaşar University

About: Yaşar University is a education organization based out in Izmir, Turkey. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Exergy & Job shop scheduling. The organization has 760 authors who have published 1436 publications receiving 20813 citations. The organization is also known as: Yaşar Üniversitesi.

Relational bonding strategies, customer satisfaction, and loyalty in the container shipping market

Abstract: In recent years, the business of container lines has faced severe challenges such as overcapacity and low profitability. To survive in such a competitive market, container lines need to maintain long-term customer relationships by enhancing the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a social exchange theory (SET) approach and investigate the impact of relational bonding strategies on the satisfaction and loyalty of customers in container shipping.,Drawing on SET, a theoretical model that specifies the relationships between relational bonding strategies, customer satisfaction and loyalty was proposed. Survey data were collected from 175 freight forwarders. The obtained data were analyzed using structural equation modelling.,The results indicate that financial bonding strategies have the most significant direct effects on customer satisfaction, while social bonding strategies have the strongest direct impact on customer loyalty. Financial bonding strategies, on the other hand, have the strongest total effects on customer loyalty. Intermodal and basic operations are found to have the equal total effects on customer loyalty.,By identifying the most effective relational bonding strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, this study’s findings allow container lines to better allocate their resources and implement effective relational marketing policies to satisfy and retain their customers.,This research analyses and validates the determinants of customer satisfaction and loyalty from a relational lens and empirically contributes to the field of relational marketing in the container shipping industry.

A General BRDF Representation Based on Tensor Decomposition

Abstract: Generating photo-realistic images through Monte Carlo rendering requires efficient representation of light–surface interaction and techniques for importance sampling. Various models with good representation abilities have been developed but only a few of them have their importance sampling procedure. In this paper, we propose a method which provides a good bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) representation and efficient importance sampling procedure. Our method is based on representing BRDF as a function of tensor products. Four-dimensional measured BRDF tensor data are factorized using Tucker decomposition. A large data set is used for comparing the proposed BRDF model with a number of well-known BRDF models. It is shown that the underlying model provides good approximation to BRDFs.