Online Service Failure and Recovery: an Integrated Meta-Analytic Perspective of Attribution and Justice Theories

Online service failure is seldom looked into in totality, from causes of failure to recovery outcomes, with reported effects on both its causes and recovery remaining contradictory and inconsistent. To address these issues, this study proposes and empirically validates an integrated meta-analytic model, grounded in attribution theory and justice theory, that explains online service failure and the subsequent recovery process, using a cumulative sample of 82,901 individuals from 24 countries across 147 studies. Meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) indicates that customer-related, service provider-related, and technology-related causes of online service failure increase customer complaints and that effective complaint handling elevates perceptions of distributive, interactional, and procedural justice, each of which strengthens positive emotions that, in turn, raise loyalty, trust, and word-of-mouth while reducing switching. Moderation analysis reveals that the differences in marketing-related factors, including brand prestige (high versus low), offering type (product-based services versus true services versus pseudo services), and purchase frequency (low versus high), together with differences in sample-related factors, such as age (young versus old), gender (male versus female), income (low versus high), and status of country development (developed versus developing), help explain the inconsistencies in reported relationships within online service failure and recovery. Therefore, this study consolidates the evidence on these relationships using the integrated model and, in doing so, advances the literature on online service failure while offering actionable insights for recovery design and execution.