Measurement.
Developed and validated survey scales, and built text-based measures from tens of thousands of consumer reviews using text mining and large language models.
Your research lead
Alireza Zolfaghari.
PhD researcher
Connecting human behaviour, rigorous measurement and computational analysis.
Discuss your studyThe expertise
behind the work.
Behavioural context.
Adoption, resistance and service failure across retail, grocery, agri-food, tourism and hospitality.
Research practice.
Supervised research assistants in data collection and coding, and taught analytics at university level.
Alireza’s research examines how people and organizations adopt, resist and experience digital services, from shoppers choosing click-and-collect to farmers declining to buy inputs online. His work combines surveys, structural equation modelling, text analytics and causal analysis of large consumer panels.
His doctoral research used large language models to study service failures and consumer responses on online travel platforms, with research featuring in Tourism Management, the International Journal of Hospitality Management and Industrial Marketing Management. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph, he led research on omnichannel retail adoption using transactional consumer panel data.
That background shapes Avestara’s approach: define the construct carefully, check the evidence against human judgment, and explain the result in terms the research team can use.
Selected peer-reviewed work
A research record
you can examine.
2025Tourism Management
Mapping value co-destruction in online travel agencies
A practice theory and customer journey perspective.
View publication ↗2025Electronic Markets
Beyond technology: Multidimensional consumption values in phygital retailing
A mixed method approach.
View publication ↗2023International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management
The cultural acceptance of digital food shopping
Conceptualization, scale development and validation.
View publication ↗2023British Food Journal
Consumer adoption of digital grocery shopping
The impact of consumers’ prior-to-use knowledge.
View publication ↗These are Alireza’s academic publications. They are not presented as Avestara client projects or institutional endorsements.
About the company
A focused research
partner.
Avestara is the operating name of 1001632298 Ontario Inc., an Ontario research company serving funded research teams and specialist research partners.
Projects are personally led by Alireza. Scope, data access, validation responsibilities and handover are agreed in advance, so the relationship is clear from the first conversation.
Research expertise is combined with AI-assisted workflows where suitable. The responsibility for method choices and interpretation stays with a named researcher.
Start with your research question
What does your
data need to tell you?
Share the question, the material and the deadline.
We’ll work out the right scope together.