L15 - Information and Product Quality; Standardization and CompatibilityReturn

This article is a part of a specific research output called Quality Influence on the Performance and Competitiveness of the Company. One of the research phases is elaborated in this article; its subject is measuring customer satisfaction with the quality of food products companies in the Czech Republic. This article aim is to determine the level of customer satisfaction with the quality of food production enterprises. The partial aim of the article is to identify factors that have the greatest influence on the customer satisfaction. The research confirms close relations between customers' quality perception, their satisfaction and the level of fulfilment of their demands.

In the present paper, we develop a monopoly model of vertical product differentiation for analysing the monopolist's decision about the possibility of versioning goods as substitutes or complements when consumers can buy them simultaneously. In this context, we find that versioning goods as substitutes or complements is optimal for the monopolist if the cost of designing the bundle (the purchase of one unit of each version) is increasing, which implies that making variants of closer substitutes reduces costs. However, if making variants of closer substitutes is costly, the monopolist versions goods as complements only. The final result also depends on the degree of concavity and convexity of the cost function.

Nonprofit organizations in transition countries experience low trust and consequently low income from donations. The study introduces one particular solution to the problem, certification, and examines its impact on the quality of the nonprofit organizations in the market. The situation is illustrated in a game theoretical model, with a manager, donor, certifier, and the charity providing a charitable good: for simplicity, charity is either good or bad: A good charity spends all the resources on the charitable good, and a bad one diverts all resources to the private consumption of its manager (for-profit in disguise). We show that for a wide parameter range and for two different disclosure rules, the presence of a certifier in the market increases the incentives for managers to choose good charities, leading to an improvement in the market as the share of good charities increases.