Customer satisfaction in urban rail: a study on transferability of structural equation models Studies on the quality of service thrive to quantify passenger satisfaction of public transport services which is a key factor in how these services are used. Service quality evaluation is performed by means of objective and subjective approaches. Considering that people are attracted to public transport services based on their own perception, subjective approaches are utilized to capture user judgment. However, there are various subjective approaches in the literature to model service quality in which different lists of factors and model structures are identified. This paper aims to test the spatial transferability of these approaches at various levels. All the adopted approaches are based on a Structural Equation Model (SEM) to evaluate the relationship between perceived service quality and customer satisfaction. First a synthesis of the literature on model transferability is presented to compare these approaches in terms of model characteristics (structural equivalence) and parameter values (measurement equivalence). Three classes of model characteristics, including six distinct SEM structures in total, are tested to identify the factors affecting service quality: (1) recommendations of previously published models from the literature, (2) established customer satisfaction theories, and (3) adopting an exploratory approach and developing it based on the previous two approaches and the nature of locally collected data. Tehran Metro Line 3, which is a heavy urban rail mode, is used as a case study. The dataset consists of three hundred validated responses collected through a customer satisfaction survey. The results indicate that model characteristics are not transferable to this case study (i.e., none of the SEM structures from previous studies were directly transferable). The best model is developed when the entire modeling procedure is repeated using a wide range of affecting factors and gradually narrowing them down through model development. The final model comprises four latent variables, namely major services, comfort, security, and minor services, the first two of which have the largest effect on service quality.

Online service quality and perceived value in mobile government success: An empirical study of mobile police in China Abstract   Measuring the success of mobile government (mgovernment) is a significant challenge faced by the public sector today, as governments are increasingly using mobile technology to provide public services to citizens and mgovernment endeavors have often fallen short of their potential. To address this gap, we draw on DeLone and McLeanxe2x80x99s (2003) updated information systems (IS) success model in order to develop an mgovernment success model that theorizes service quality as comprising online and offline service quality and further uses perceived value to measure net benefits. The results of a survey of 286 mgovernment users in China indicate that information quality and online service quality, but not system quality, are positively associated with citizen satisfaction, which in turn is positively associated with perceived value. The results also show that the relationship between online service quality and citizen satisfaction is positively moderated by offline service quality, while citizen satisfaction partially mediates the relationships between information qualityonline service quality (but not system quality) and perceived value. This study extends the updated IS success model by differentiating between online and offline service quality, as well as by introducing the notion of perceived value. Our results provide guidance to researchers and practitioners regarding the role of service quality and perceived value in measuring mgovernment system success.