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Online retailers widely use self-service parcel delivery as a solution to the last-mile logistics problems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that affect the consumer’s intention to use self-service parcel delivery service.

The authors integrate prior research and propose a comprehensive three-factor model. The study combines individual and situational factors and proposes a socialized factor.

This study found that location convenience, optimism, innovation, and the need for human interaction positively affect the consumer’s intention to avail of the self-service parcel delivery service. It also identifies that socialized factor positively influences the consumer’s intention to use self-service parcel delivery services.

The test results show that the explanatory power of the individual factors of the model is better than that of the situational factors. However, this does not imply that the situational factors cannot explain the consumer behavior well. Future studies should employ additional situational factors to explain the consumer behavior.

This study offers valuable theoretical and managerial implications. Delivery service providers should concentrate on their marketing force and customize their services for consumer groups who have specific individual characteristics, such as optimism and innovation.

Strengthening service interactions in the social factor and choosing optimal locations for self-service pickup machines are also essential for the expansion of the users’ population and enhancement of service experience.

The authors combined situational and individual factors, proposed a socialized factor, and presented the three-factor model of the consumer’s intention to use self-service parcel delivery service.

As consumer debt can substantially impair subjective well-being, it is crucial for research to gain insights into how consumers can be motivated to improve financial planning. This paper aims to investigate how frontline employees in financial services can help consumers regulate their financial planning behaviors and how financial service providers can effectively support their frontline employees in this effort through leadership and organizational climate.

We incorporate regulatory focus theory and conservation of resource theory to develop a conceptual model that we test in a triadic study with a unique dataset collected from consumers, frontline employees, and managers in the banking sector.

We find that frontline employees must pay attention to the details of consumers’ needs and customize the service to those needs to trigger consumer promotion focus and stimulate consumers’ financial planning behaviors. Moreover, our results emphasize that the organization must act as an integrated entity. Thus, a manager’s servant leadership and an organizational climate of customer stewardship are crucial for frontline employees to transform consumers’ financial planning behaviors.

The study highlights frontline employees’ key role in motivating consumer financial planning behavior, offering a new perspective in transformative service research on enhancing financial well-being.

The findings provide financial service providers with actionable implications for enhancing consumers’ financial planning. This benefits both consumers and financial institutions, as customers with greater spending power can buy more financial products.

This study advances transformative service research on consumer financial planning behavior, which has largely focused on consumer-related or society-level variables, by exploring the role of frontline employees and organizational support in terms of leadership and climate.

At the beginning of the 21st century, multiple and diverse social entities, including the public (consumers), private and nonprofit healthcare institutions, government (public health) and other industry sectors, began to recognize the limitations of the current fragmented healthcare system paradigm. Primary stakeholders, including employers, insurance companies, and healthcare professional organizations, also voiced dissatisfaction with unacceptable health outcomes and rising costs. Grand challenges and wicked problems threatened the viability of the health sector. American health systems responded with innovations and advances in healthcare delivery frameworks that encouraged shifts from intra- and inter-sector arrangements to multi-sector, lasting relationships that emphasized patient centrality along with long-term commitments to sustainability and accountability. This pathway, leading to a population health approach, also generated the need for transformative business models. The coproduction of health framework, with its emphasis on cross-sector alignments, nontraditional partner relationships, sustainable missions, and accountability capable of yielding return on investments, has emerged as a unique strategy for facing disruptive threats and challenges from nonhealth sector corporations. This chapter presents a coproduction of health framework, goals and criteria, examples of boundary spanning network alliance models, and operational (integrator, convener, aggregator) strategies. A comparison of important organizational science theories, including institutional theory, network/network analysis theory, and resource dependency theory, provides suggestions for future research directions necessary to validate the utility of the coproduction of health framework as a precursor for paradigm change.

Empirically evaluates a model of service guarantees by addressing the impact of a service guarantee on consumers’ satisfaction evaluations. Proposes a model suggesting that the differentiating and signaling properties of a guarantee can influence service provider satisfaction and that a service guarantee may capitalize on the coproduction nature of services to increase consumer self‐satisfaction and overall satisfaction. Finds empirical support that a guarantee can influence post‐consumption evaluations, even in the absence of service failure and the guarantee being invoked, and therefore suggests that a service guarantee may influence consumer satisfaction even if the service is already highly reliable.

This paper seeks to propose Albert Hirschman's theory of “exit, voice and loyalty” as a complementary conceptual framework to Hofstede's cultural dimensions and use them in conjunction to compare consumer satisfaction with services across cultures.

A model of satisfaction with complex services (higher education) is developed and then tested in two different cultures, Colombia and Spain, with a sample of 879 students. Structural equation modeling based on the partial least squares algorithm is used to test the proposed model.

Colombian students are more satisfied with the educational system than Spanish ones. This is explained by cultural and contextual differences that pose greater restrictions on accessibility to higher education, provide fewer choice alternatives and present more switching costs for the Colombian student.

This study applies the conditions of Hirschman's theory in an international setting, offering a rich basis for understanding differences in consumer satisfaction that accounts for intra‐national diversity.

Bitner’s (1992) concept of servicescape has received widespread academic attention, resulting in many conceptual and empirical studies. By scanning the servicescape literature and other relevant concepts, Pizam and Tasci (2019) provided experienscape, an expanded version of servicescape, to be measured from different stakeholders’ perspectives with a multidisciplinary approach. This paper aims to build on Pizam and Tasci’s conceptualization of experienscape and expand its nomological network with other pertinent concepts related to different stakeholders with an interdisciplinary approach.

This is a conceptual study analyzing diverse literature related to servicescape, experienscape and other related concepts and theories to provide an integrated and holistic picture of experienscape for more robust theory development. Several new relationships are synthesized for hypothesis development and testing in future research.

The review of past research reveals that servicescape literature has mostly focused on outcomes for the benefit of brands and firms and missed outcomes for consumers and other stakeholders. In addition, servicescape literature lacks several critical concepts in the affective, cognitive and behavioral reaction domains, as well as moderator factors. The relevance of some theories such as branding (e.g. brand identity, personality, image, perceived quality, consumer value, brand value and self-congruity), cocreation/coproduction/codestruction, transformation, subjective happiness, subjective well-being and quality of life is completely overlooked.

Experienscape is a container of complex systems where needs, wants and expectations of multiple stakeholders are entertained, often at the same time through dynamic interactions among multiple stakeholders. Thus, a holistic understanding of experienscape requires dynamic integration of theories explaining the behavior of different stakeholders by cross-fertilizing theories through interdisciplinary research rather than unidisciplinary or multidisciplinary research conducted in separate silos.

By adopting Pizam and Tasci’s (2019) experienscape concept, this study expanded the relational network of service environment components (i.e. sensory, functional, social, natural and cultural components of experienscape) by incorporating diverse theories and concepts that explain cognitive, affective and conative reactions of different stakeholders to an experience environment. Additionally, the current study recommends attention to human-centric outcomes such as transformation, subjective well-being, subjective happiness and quality of life, which were completely overlooked in previous servicescape research.

Coproduction, as one component of cocreation of value, offers many benefits to customers and management, but also requires customers to invest a considerable amount of effort and time. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the coproduction paradox of benefits and costs.

One experimental study and two cross-sectional field studies across three service industries test the nonlinear relationship between level of coproduction and customer loyalty.

Results show not only the optimum level but also the negative effects of increasing levels of coproduction on customer loyalty and, in turn, monetary expenditures. The negative effect can be partially offset by perceived process enjoyment (PE), such that consumers who enjoy the process exhibit increased loyalty after the optimum coproduction point. Customer self-efficacy (SE), however, further strengthens the inverted u-shaped relationship.

Further research should try to replicate the findings in more complex and less hedonic service settings (e.g. financial investments) because both PE and SE might be even more powerful here.

Service managers need to determine the optimal degree to which customers want to engage in the creation of services and avoid overburdening them. Management should further explore opportunities to elicit feelings of fun and enjoyment through coproduction.

Research usually highlights the potential benefits of coproduction for customers and companies and suggests a positive linear relationship between coproduction and success outcomes. This article instead shows that after an optimum level, the marginal benefits of coproduction for customer loyalty turn negative.

This study aims to propose a model for predicting consumers’ esports videogame engagement on their ensuing consumption behaviors, which remains nebulous to date.

After approaching esports consumers in different gaming zones in Pakistan, this paper collected data from 364 videogame-based esports consumers. This paper deployed SmartPLS 3.2.8 software to perform the partial least squares-structural equation modeling-based analyzes.

The structural model results show that consumers’ affective and behavioral esports videogame engagement positively affects their consumption behavior, including heightened community engagement, purchase intent, coproduction, word-of-mouth and new player recruitment. However, while consumers’ cognitive esports engagement was found to positively impact community engagement, new player recruitment and coproduction, it failed to predict consumers’ esports-related purchase intent or word-of-mouth behaviors.

The findings reveal that a strategic focus on consumers’ esports game engagement will enable practitioners to nurture desirable consumer behaviors, including enhanced purchase intent, coproduction, word-of-mouth and new player recruitment behaviors, thus warranting consumer engagement’s strategic value as a key esports gaming metric.

Empirical research into the role of consumers’ esports videogame engagement on their ensuing consumption behaviors remains scant to date. Based on this gap, this study offers a timely contribution by exploring and validating a model that gauges the effect of consumers’ cognitive, emotional and behavioral esports videogame engagement on their community engagement, purchase intention, coproduction, word-of-mouth and new player recruitment. It, thus, offers important insight into the rapidly advancing field of digital esports games.

Drawing on the fairness theory, this paper aims to propose a conceptual framework that investigates how co-creation in the failed service delivery (coproduction intensity) and co-creation in the service recovery affect customers’ evaluation of the firm’s competence, justice and ethicalness, and ultimately their willingness to co-create in the future.

Tax services were chosen as the research context. A consumer panel consisting of individuals who live in the USA and have used tax preparation services within the past year was recruited. The first study explores what happens to customers’ ethical perceptions during a failed co-created service encounter. A secondary study investigates what happens to customers’ ethical perceptions in the event that the failed co-created service is recovered.

The findings show that customers’ perceptions of the firm’s abilities and ethics are impeded by coproduction intensity but favorably influenced by co-creation of recovery.

A sense of ethicalness and fairness is violated when co-created service failure occurs, but fortunately, practitioners can count on engaging customers in the service recovery process as co-creators of the solution to positively alter perceived ethicalness and fairness.

Failed co-created services represent an under-researched area in the marketing literature. Current investigations of co-created service failures have largely approached the notion of fairness from a perceived justice perspective without referencing ethical judgments. However, fairness is grounded in basic ethical assumptions of normative treatment. This research is among the first to highlight the importance of perceived ethicalness in the context of co-created service failure and recovery.

The potential displeasure (e.g. strain, uncertainty and lack of control) involved in the process of obtaining eudaimonic outcomes (e.g. becoming healthier or more knowledgeable) may turn consumers away from a transformative service or hinder their coproduction. This paper aims to propose a service design that could overcome this conflict.

To allow for concrete discussions of service design, the proposed design is developed in the context of a specific transformative service: the higher educational service.

It is possible to transform the relationship between hedonic and eudaimonic outcomes from conflicting to complementary goals by replacing passive pleasure that is irrelevant or in conflict with eudaimonic well-being with active pleasure that is complementary to eudaimonic well-being. To facilitate simultaneous attainment of active pleasure and eudaimonic well-being, the transformative service provider needs to structure the elements of the service to create the conditions for the optimal experience to occur.

The proposed design is extendable to other human service contexts.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this research is the first that shows how a transformative service can be effectively designed to overcome the potential conflict between its eudaimonic versus hedonic outcomes, such that the service will be well received by consumers while remain faithful to its transformative goal.