We examine the relationship between student-oriented service responsibility in higher education and students’ degree-value judgments, with perceived skill-development support modeled as the link. Survey data from 1,669 Romanian students (1,655 complete SEM cases) show that enabling resources and standards alignment are both positively related to this support, with a numerically larger unstandardized estimate for enabling resources. Skill-development support is related to higher teaching-quality satisfaction, more favorable EU comparability assessments, and weaker foreign-credential advantage beliefs. All six modeled indirect associations have bootstrap confidence intervals excluding zero, consistent with observable support informing degree-value judgments under delayed verification.
As competition in peer-to-peer sharing services intensifies, ensuring business continuity is crucial for platform providers (PPs) and peer service providers (PSPs). This study explores how failure severity and the source of service recovery influence customer behavioral intentions that impact the business continuity of PPs and PSPs, with customer anger change as a mediator. Results indicate that PSP-led recovery in severe failures increases intentions to give good review scores to PSPs without mediating anger change, while in low-severity failures, it enhances reuse intentions for PPs by mediating anger change. The findings provide valuable insights into effective service recovery strategies for sustaining PPs and PSPs.
This study investigates how supply chain structures and service configurations differ across firms operating in different industry contexts. Drawing on complex network theory and service-dominant logic, it analyzes data from 46,300 Korean firms to examine the co-evolution of structural topology and service architecture. Results show clear industry patterns: industrial product sectors form centralized, hub-oriented networks supporting efficiency-oriented service systems, whereas consumer product sectors display distributed, adaptive structures fostering flexibility-oriented services. Hybrid industries combine both logics by balancing centralized control with decentralized responsiveness. These findings suggest that network topology is associated with different patterns of coordination and potential value co-creation in interorganizational service systems. The study also offers managerial guidance for aligning service design with network structure, emphasizing that effective service coordination and value co-creation depend on achieving structural–service fit in supply chain service ecosystems.
Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, this study examines how digital enabling data systems affect innovation performance in digital service firms, exploring the mediator of knowledge reconfiguration and the moderator of knowledge inertia. Analyzing 318 Chinese firm samples, it finds that digital enabling data systems positively enhance digital service firms’ innovation performance. Both knowledge reconfiguration deepening and extension positively mediate the relationship between digital enabling data systems and innovation performance, while both learning and experience inertia negatively moderate the relationship between digital enabling data systems and both knowledge reconfigurations. This study provides practical insights for digital service firms to enhance innovation.
This study introduces the Tri-Metric Service Quality Portfolio, integrating the Kano model, customer satisfaction coefficients, and the PCSI index with extended e-SERVQUAL to provide the multidimensional perspective required for optimal resource allocation in dynamic digital environments. Empirically applied to South Korean real-time OTT sports streaming platforms, our comparative analysis reveals that strategic quality priorities shift asymmetrically by service maturity. Early-stage platforms must prioritize core technological reliability, whereas mature providers should focus on qualitative differentiation. This framework provides an actionable diagnostic tool to optimize quality investments.
Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model, theory of consumption values (TCV), and social influence theory, this study investigates how over-the-top (OTT) recommender system features shape customer experiences and consumers’ continued usage intention. Survey data from 505 Taiwanese subscribers were analyzed via SEM with AMOS. The results show that match-up and the evaluation function enhance utilitarian value and hedonic value, which in turn drive continued usage intention, while social influence strengthens key stimulus–organism pathways. Theoretically, this study integrates the SOR model, TCV, and social influence theory to explain value formation in OTT recommender systems. For managers, it demonstrates how recommender design and social signaling strategies can be leveraged to strengthen user experiences and retention.
This study explores whether, how, and when customer courtesy encourages employees’ service adaptive behavior (SAB) based on affective events theory. Utilizing time-lagged data from 357 service employees, this study finds that customer courtesy promotes SAB, and harmonious work passion mediates this relationship. Additionally, two moderators are identified from individual traits and organizational characteristics: employees’ need for esteem strengthens the effect of customer courtesy on harmonious work passion, while organizational service scripts weaken the influence of harmonious work passion on SAB. The findings reveal the mechanism and boundary conditions of customer courtesy’s impact on employees’ SAB, also providing guidance for the hospitality industry to promote SAB.
Many nonprofit organizations struggle to retain their volunteers. This study examined why volunteers consider leaving, focusing on commitment (affective, normative) and motivational regulations (as outlined by Self-Determination Theory). Data from 470 sports club volunteers in Belgium revealed five commitment subgroups and corresponding motivational profiles. Volunteers with high affective commitment and autonomous motivation had the lowest turnover intentions, while those with high normative commitment —indicating indebted obligation— showed higher controlled motivation, amotivation and turnover. When combined with moderate affective commitment, low normative commitment reflected a neutral state. These findings confirm that both the quality and quantity of commitment and motivation matter.
While leader humility is increasingly seen as essential in service contexts, its impact on employee communication remains nuanced. Guided by social exchange theory, this time-lagged field study examines how leader humility shapes constructive voice and cooperative silence through perceived inclusion, and how these effects vary with employees’‘ positive reciprocity beliefs. Survey data from 189 supervisor–employee dyads in Taiwan show that leader humility fosters inclusion, which in turn promotes voice and reinforces silence. These indirect effects are amplified among employees with strong reciprocity beliefs, revealing the dual nature of humble leadership in influencing employee communication dynamics.
A Product-Service System (PSS) is a promising and widely accepted concept that integrates products and services for achieving sustainability. With the advent of the big data, numerous opportunities have emerged for the development and operation of data-driven PSSs. Despite this, existing research provides limited insight into the strategic utilization of data in PSS development, particularly with respect to roadmap-based approaches that systematically address critical data-related considerations while explicitly accounting for variations in data contexts across different PSS types. In response, this study investigates how data contributes to the PSS design and how technology roadmapping can be tailored. By differentiating the structural, functional, and procedural aspects of the three types of PSS roadmaps with relevant case examples, this paper provides a comprehensive understanding of their unique characteristics. The proposed data-driven roadmapping approaches aim to support both practitioners and researchers in systematically developing PSSs based on a concrete and actionable methodology.
This research investigates the influence of ESG practices on the overall performance of service businesses in Thailand. Furthermore, service and international diversification are included as moderating variables to thoroughly examine this relationship. Employing a database of 125 service firms, with a study period spanning 2019–2023. The results indicate that service diversification moderates the relationship between ESG practices and performance of service firms. International diversification, however, negatively moderates the relationship between ESG practices and firm performance in Thai service firms. International diversification reduces this relationship, highlighting institutional complexity and strategic misalignment as major constraints, even while service diversification increases their ability to convert ESG engagement into performance enhancements.
This study examines the sequential pathway from digital health literacy to health management behaviors via cognitive evaluations on social platforms, such as SNSs and portal sites, and generative AI platforms. A set of hypotheses was developed and tested using a process-utilization-performance framework with data from 354 user responses. The results show that digital health literacy activates infodemic response capability, improving information comprehension, source credibility assessment, and disease risk perception. Furthermore, multi-group analysis revealed that cognitive activation and the translation of utilization into behavior are more significant on social platforms. These results underscore the importance of creating digital health strategies tailored to community-driven versus algorithm-driven environments.
The limited research on consumer resistance to artificial intelligence-based frontline service technologies (AI-based FSTs) has been overshadowed by studies emphasizing the drivers for its adoption. By integrating innovation diffusion and innovation resistance theories, we systematically reviewed and synthesized the relevant literature and, following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) framework, distinguished between forms of resistance and explained how they shape consumers’ willingness or unwillingness to try AI-based FSTs. The findings offer actionable insights for management by identifying how design, communication, and implementation choices trigger or mitigate resistance and outline future research pathways in AI-enabled service innovation.
Although airports have increasingly adopted technology-based services, automation does not uniformly enhance passenger satisfaction. This study examines where and under what conditions human services should be replaced by or integrated with technology along the airport journey, emphasizing perceived waiting time. A Delphi study identified key airport services, followed by a Kano survey of 320 international passengers to evaluate 23 service attributes using traditional and modified Kano models. The results show that service preferences vary across touchpoints and are shaped by perceived waiting times. These findings highlight the context-specific value of service automation and inform optimized human-technology service design in airports.
Grounded in attribution theory, this study examines how robotic empathy influences customers’ motive attributions and continued usage intention. We conducted a scenario-based experiment (N = 347) and a field survey of hotel guests (N = 216). Across studies, high-empathy responses enhance service enhancement attributions and reduce cost reduction attributions, thereby strengthening continued usage intention. Neuroticism further moderated these attribution processes, such that high-neuroticism consumers were more likely to infer cost reduction motives under low empathy, whereas this tendency weakened when empathy was high. This study answers prior calls for research and provides important practical implications.
This study examines customer satisfaction drivers in the expanding dog hotel industry. Based on a sample of Google reviews posted about U.S. dog hotels, Latent Dirichlet Allocation and sentiment analysis were applied to identify key service dimensions, which was followed by the application of a cumulative link model for ordinal regression to assess the dimensions’ impact on star ratings. Seven dimensions emerged, with receiving updates, overall experience and grooming services exerting the strongest influence on satisfaction, while logistical aspects exerted the least. Staff professionalism and guardians’ emotional wellbeing received the highest sentiment ratings. The research findings offer practical insights into improving service delivery in the companion animal hospitality sector.
Although both attraction-related word-of-mouth (WOM) in tourism and spoilers in media communication involve the premature disclosure of content, no prior research has applied spoiler-based concepts to explain how attraction-related WOM shapes tourists’ decisions and experience expectations. This research addresses this gap through two studies that integrate the spoiler theory with tourism information processing. Study 1 conceptualizes the willingness to engage in spoilers (tourists’ willingness to receive attraction-related WOM) as a core construct and examines how practical motivation and lack-of-interest constraint influence this willingness and, in turn, shape entertainment and escapism expectations of the attraction. Partial least squares (PLS) analysis using data from 232 responses regarding Taiwan’s Ruifang–Ruisan Coal Preparation Plant Museum, a former coal mine that has been converted into a museum of the coal mining history, reveals that spoiler engagement through attraction-related WOM enhances both types of experience expectations. Study 2 incorporates perceived spoilage (the extent to which individuals are perceived as being spoiled), need-for-cognition (tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking), and need-for-affect (tendency to seek or avoid emotional experiences) to investigate how functional and sign values embedded in attraction-related WOM influence perceived spoilage and visit intention. This study also tests whether the need-for-affect and need-for-cognition moderate the relationship between information value and perceived spoilage. PLS analysis of 236 responses from the same attraction as that in Study 1 reveals that functional value increases perceived spoilage and the need-for-cognition weakens this effect. Theoretically, this research bridges the literature on both spoilers and tourism WOM by conceptualizing attraction-related WOM as a context-specific form of a spoiler. The findings demonstrate that schema discrepancy, comprehension, and perceptual fluency mechanisms better account for tourists’ responses than traditional excitation-transfer explanation, thereby extending the spoiler theory beyond entertainment contexts and clarifying conditions under which foreknowledge enhances rather than undermines anticipation. Practically, the results indicate that tourism marketers can disclose attraction details without fearing detrimental emotional outcomes: attraction-related WOM generally elevates experience expectations and visit intention. Moreover, tailoring the level and type of information to tourists’ cognitive and affective dispositions can optimize pre-trip engagement and reduce uncertainty among tourists.
The amount of compensation for service failures significantly influences consumer satisfaction, but both under- and overcompensation can be ineffective. Customer expectations for monetary compensation vary by service context. This study explores three contextual factors—service recovery characteristics, service type, and failure type—through scenario-based experiments. The findings reveal that outcome failures require higher compensation than process failures, and expectations increase with failure severity. Additionally, positive emotional displays by employees enhance the recovery experience but cannot replace fair compensation. These insights offer guidance for tailoring service recovery strategies to specific service contexts.
Effectively managing service failures in online-to-offline (O2O) services, such as delayed deliveries or unsatisfactory service, plays a crucial role in shaping customer perceptions and building platform’s ability to retain customers. This study investigates the impact of perceived justice in service recovery within O2O environments and examines how these perceptions affect customer satisfaction and repurchase intentions. Our findings highlight that recovery types and on or offline locus of recovery play differential influence on three dimensions of perceived justice. Also, post-recovery satisfaction is a significant mediator between perceived justice and repurchase intention.
The choice between franchising or owning locations is critical for many restaurant chains. Yet, findings on the extent to which chains should franchise are inconsistent with some research showing positive, negative, or minimal relationships between franchise proportion and chain performance. We help to reconcile these inconsistent findings by applying agency theory to propose and subsequently find that higher franchise proportions are beneficial in less munificent environments and in more turbulent environments. Our findings create a more accurate understanding of the relationship between franchising and chain performance by identifying environmental munificence and turbulence as critical contextual factors.
