Drs. Spahr and Sunderman published in Service Business

For release:  September 15, 2016

Dr. Ronald Spahr, professor of Finance, and Dr. Mark Sunderman, Morris Fogelman Real Estate Chair of Excellence and professor of Finance, recently had a paper accepted for publication in Service Business. The paper entitled, "A Learning-Oriented Decision-Making Process for Real Estate Brokerage Service Evaluation," was coauthored with Dr. Fernando Ferreira, University Institute of Lisbon Portugal; Dr. Audrius Banaitis, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania; and Dr. João J. M. Ferreira, University of Beira Interior, Portugal. Dr. Fernando Ferreira was a visiting scholar and is now a University of Memphis research associate.

Their paper develops a learning-oriented decision-making process for evaluating real estate brokerage services. It concentrates on understanding the nature, the role, and the interaction of the evaluation aspects of real estate brokerage service quality by integrating cognitive maps and the Decision Expert (DEX) approach. Previous evaluation approaches fail to comprehensively identify the manner by which service quality should be evaluated. The paper's learning-oriented decision making process comprehensively identifies key real estate brokerage service attributes; thus, reducing the number of unidentified criteria vis-a-vis conventional approaches. Results suggest that this framework enables consideration of new rudiments in realtor decision-making and sales processes.