【主讲】薛梅，波士顿学院卡罗尔管理学院副教授

【主题】为何银行仍在拓展其分支机构——虚拟渠道带给实体渠道扩张的影响分析

【时间】2010-3-24（周三）10:30 – 12:00

【地点】清华经管学院 伟伦楼453室

【语言】英文

【主办】清华大学现代管理研究中心

清华大学经济管理学院管理科学工程系

报告摘要

Multi-channel service systems that combine both physical and virtual (e.g., online or phone) service locations as well as employee-based full service and customer self-service have evolved in most service industries. Of special interest is increasing role of virtual self-service options such as online banking, online retail or web-based customer self-support, which was essentially non-existent before the Internet was available for commercial activity. One of the explanations for the investment in virtual self-service was to shift customers from high cost and sometimes inconvenient physical channels to virtual channels, which would enable firms to reduce capacity or slow expansion of physical channels. However, in some prominent service industries, the opposite has been observed. For instance, the Federal Reserve economists have noted that the number of commercial bank branches in theUShas risen 39% from 1998 to 2006. In this paper we present a spatial competition model that relates customer use of virtual channels to the optimal capacity of physical channels. Our results suggest that the combination of competitive effects and the fact that customers can use virtual channels as alternatives for the physical channels to fulfill some of their service demands leads to a situation where increased use of virtual channels is linked to the increases in both the number of physical channel locations as well as the probability of locating a physical channel in a new market. The predictions of our model are then tested using data on retail bank locations and found to hold in theUSmarket.

Dr. Mei Xue is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Carroll School of Management,BostonCollege. She is a Research Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and a WeBI Fellow of the Wharton E-business Initiative, both at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, a Faculty Fellow of the Service Leadership Center at Arizona State University, a Research Fellow at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (China) and an Adjunct Research Scholar at Columbia Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. Dr. Xue received her Ph.D. in Management Science and Applied Economics from theWhartonSchool,UniversityofPennsylvania. Dr. Xue’s research interests include service co-production and Customer Efficiency Management (CEM), service delivery in multi-channel delivery systems, process design and contracting of knowledge-intensive services (e.g. consulting), and productivity and efficiency analysis of service industries including banking, consulting, retail and healthcare. Professor Xue served as the principle investigator of a research project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF): “Customer Efficiency and the Management of Multi-channel Service Delivery System” that investigated service management in financial service industries from 2005 to 2008. The project involved severalU.S.banks including one of the top-five retail banks worldwide. She currently serves on the editorial review board of Production and Operations Management (POM) and a guest co-editor for its upcoming special issue on “The Theory and Practice of Operations Management inChina”.