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Academic research has supported the belief that consumers undertip minority race service workers due to implicit racial biases. However, there has been less focus in examining possible moderating factors. This paper aims to fill this gap by analyzing the role of direct and indirect experience in tipping frontline service workers from a minority background. Given the prominence of customer ratings on digital service platforms and the perception that African Americans are discriminated against, the authors look at the interplay of interaction length (direct experience) and customer ratings (indirect experience) on the relationship between race and tipping.

An expectancy disconfirmation framework was developed and tested with a sample of 360 US participants in an online experiment. The experiment followed a 2 × (race: African-American versus Caucasian) × 2 (direct experience: limited versus extensive) × 3 (indirect experience: absent versus positive versus negative customer rating) design.

The authors found consumers who have extended direct experience (longer service interaction) and no indirect experience (absent customer ratings) tipped African Americans more than Caucasians. Interestingly, this effect is reduced in the presence of indirect experience (customer ratings). Finally, where the consumer lacks direct experience (shorter service interaction) but is exposed to positive indirect experience (positive customer ratings), consumers tip African Americans more.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that examines the role of direct and indirect experience in the relationship between race and tipping. Based on the authors’ findings, the authors provide several contributions, including recommendations to reduce inequalities arising from implicit racial bias on digital service platforms.

Dyadic interactions between customers and service providers rarely occur in isolation. Still, there is a lack of systematic knowledge about the roles that different types of nontechnological third parties – that is, other customers, pets, other employees and other firms – can adopt in relation to customers and service providers during encounters. The present study aims to unravel these roles and highlight their implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties.

This research relies on a systematic review of literature in the Web of Science using a search string pertaining to the research study’s objectives. In total, 2,726 articles were screened by title and abstract using clear inclusion and exclusion criteria, thereby extracting 189 articles for full-text eligibility. The final sample consisted of 139 articles for coding and analysis.

The analyses reveal that other customers, pets, other employees and other firms can adopt five roles: bystander, connector, endorser, balancer and partner. Each role has different implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties. Additionally, the five roles are associated with distinct constellations of the customer, the service provider and the third party. These roles and constellations are dynamic and not mutually exclusive.

This research contributes to the service encounter literature by providing a thorough understanding of the various third-party roles and their implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties during encounters. As such, this research sheds light on the conditions under which third parties become “significant others” in service encounters and identifies avenues for future research.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to analyse the implications generated by a service perspective.

A conceptual analysis of two approaches to understanding service perspectives, service logic (SL) and service-dominant logic (SDL), reveals direct and indirect marketing implications.

The SDL is based on a metaphorical view of co-creation and value co-creation, in which the firm, customers and other actors participate in the process that leads to value for customers. The approach is firm-driven; the service provider drives value creation. The managerial implications are not service perspective-based, and co-creation may be imprisoned by its metaphor. In contrast, SL takes an analytical approach, with co-creation concepts that can significantly reinvent marketing from a service perspective. Value gets created in customer processes, and value creation is customer driven. Ten managerial SL principles derived from these analyses offer theoretical and practical conclusions with the potential to reinvent marketing.

The SDL can direct researchers’ and managers’ views towards complex value-generation processes. The SL can analyse this process on a managerial level, to derive customer-centric, service perspective-based opportunities to reinvent marketing.

The analysis and principles help marketing break free from offering only value propositions and become an organisation-wide responsibility. Firms must organise service-influenced marketing and create a customer focus among all employees, beyond conventional marketing.

A service perspective on business has key managerial implications and enables researchers and managers to find new, customer-centric, service-influenced marketing approaches.

With a start in the observation that there is a large variation in how companies interact with each other, the paper aims to anlayse the economic consequences of this variation. As the more extensive interaction is costly, the variation also indicates a variation in the economic dimension.

This is a conceptual paper.

Three different economic streams can be identified. Firstly, the interaction costs can be reduced by taking advantage of time and scope. Interaction over time give opportunity to use some of the costs as investments through creation of relationships. By using the same counterpart for several products, scope can be used to reduce interaction costs. Secondly, developed business relationships can be used to create relation revenues. The counterparts can use each other for developing better solutions and for development of knowledge. Finally, the actors can also get positive network effects. One example is the joint development with third parties such as sub-suppliers or customer’s customer.

The discussion ends in two major implications. One is the central role of managers and the other the crucial role of economic deals. Managers are crucial both to identify relevant cost and revenue items as well as to exploit them. Deals are important as it is only with direct counterparts where there are monetary streams. In all other relationships, there is only indirect consequences.

It is obvious that the type of cost and revenue streams identified above will require new and different economic tools. A base for this is given here.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how different policy perspectives or logics regarding industry organising affect network interaction, with particular focus on how the availability of resources is organised.

To examine this, the authors compare two cases from the Norwegian seafood industry: in the pelagic industry, the main resource (mackerel) is caught at sea by fishing vessels and trade is restricted by an auction system, whereas in the salmon industry, the main resource (farmed salmon) is an industrial product produced at fish farms and there are no such restrictions.

The results indicate that conditions under which resources are available to a network have strong effects on connected relationships: in the pelagic industry, interaction in the network becomes supplier-directed in an attempt to reduce the uncertainty created by unstable and restricted availability of resources, whereas in the salmon industry the interaction becomes customer directed as resource availability is stable and predictable. Here the actors can broaden the scope of interaction and they can direct their efforts to solve their customers’ problems, whereas this is difficult in the pelagic industry. The authors conclude that policy considerations play a major role in these effects. If the resource (fish) is seen as a commodity and the interaction is seen as a market mechanism, the policies designed to facilitate the exchange of resources will be beneficial for the actors directly involved, but may have unintended negative consequences for indirect relationships.

For policy makers this implies that whenever developing an industrial policy there are strong reasons to look beyond the single transaction in order to create policies that are effective and/or beneficial for all involved and connected parties.

This paper aims to explore the different forms of other customers' influence in various service settings.

The critical incident technique (CIT) method was used to collect and analyze the data. A total of 142 critical incidents involving other customers' influence in services were collected.

Based on CIT analysis, nine types of other customers' influence involving positive and negative, direct and indirect customer‐to‐customer interactions emerge. In addition, the researchers find that the degree of other customers' influence varies for different service settings.

Methodologically, there are a number of limitations of the CIT method used in this research. The paper suggests ways to overcome these limitations. Moreover, findings of this research suggest a number of additional directions for future research.

This research suggests the importance of proactively managing customer‐to‐customer interactions during a service encounter experience.

This paper builds on previous research and provides empirically based analysis of the different forms of other customers' influence across service settings.

The research community currently employs four very different versions of the social network concept: A social network is seen as a set of socially constructed role relations (e.g., friends, business partners), a set of interpersonal sentiments (e.g., liking, trust), a pattern of behavioral social interaction (e.g., conversations, citations), or an opportunity structure for exchange. Researchers conventionally assume these conceptualizations are interchangeable as social ties, and some employ composite measures that aim to capture more than one dimension. Even so, important discrepancies often appear for non-ties (as dyads where a specific role relation or sentiment is not reported, a specific form of interaction is not observed, or exchange is not possible).

Investigating the interplay across the four definitions is a step toward developing scope conditions for generalization and application of theory across these domains.

This step is timely because emerging tools of computational social science – wearable sensors, logs of telecommunication, online exchange, or other interaction – now allow us to observe the fine-grained dynamics of interaction over time. Combined with cutting-edge methods for analysis, these lenses allow us to move beyond reified notions of social ties (and non-ties) and instead directly observe and analyze the dynamic and structural interdependencies of social interaction behavior.

This unprecedented opportunity invites us to refashion dynamic structural theories of exchange that advance “beyond networks” to unify previously disjoint research streams on relationships, interaction, and opportunity structures.

The need to explore consumer reactions to any form of marketing is central to the marketing concept and this paper reports part of an industry‐funded project to investigate how consumers interact with direct marketing. The programme was qualitative, based on both individual depth interviews and group discussions. A theme of “paradox” emerged from the research in a variety of ways. Consumers generally take a pragmatic view of marketing activity, but at the same time they are sceptical of much direct marketing. The research identifies consumers’ key concerns with direct marketing as: privacy, control and relevance. The resulting “gaps” between direct marketing practice and consumer expectations and desires produce clearer areas for the direct marketer to address.

This paper aims to address the crucial interactions that a start-up enacts with actors from the public sphere in a context of medical technologies. The public actor commonly plays multiple roles, ranging from co-developers and financiers to large-scale users, which are all pivotal to the development and survival of the new venture. The paper investigates the possible “dark sides” of a start-up’s marriage with a public partner, departing from three specific roles the public sphere can assume in relation to a start-up: as a development partner, as a financer and as a customer.

The study builds on an in-depth empirical case study of a Swedish med-tech startup company.

The authors find the financing role to be least problematic, whereas the customer role is the most problematic in that it provides numerous barriers to the possible development and growth of a start-up firm striving to get new customers in a public setting. Examples of the most prominent barriers found are regulations, complex decision-making processes and assessment elements of med-tech products that are outside the control of the startup firm, hence issues that cannot be handled within inter-organizational relationships.

The study builds on 27 in-depth interviews, which were undertaken during 2005-2013, thus contributing detailed data about a start-up’s many and crucial interactions with different public actors. Departing from three different roles, a public partner can adopt in relation to a start-up, (development, co-financer and customer) provides results with managerial implications for start-up’s and policy implications for health-care policy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how online interaction with an organization impacts not only those users participating in the exchange, but also those that witness the interaction and are influenced as suggested by social cognitive theory.

This study utilized a mixed methodological approach. First, 20 interviews with social media users were conducted to explore their perceptions of observed two-way communication between organizations and other users within social media spaces. An experiment then compared the effects of interacting with an organization via social media vs simply observing organizations interacting with other users.

The findings from both studies support the assertion that publics do not have to actively participate in two-way communication with an organization for an observed exchange to have an impact. When an organization has a conversation with one follower, others see that interaction and are affected by it.

This study has implications for the practice of online communication by organizations. Practitioners must consider how interactions impact those publics who are observing rather than only the few who are engaging. In the social media realm, priority should be given to followers posting legitimate questions or concerns. Responding to positive comments can also improve perceptions of the organization but is seen as going above and beyond.

This paper introduces the concept of vicarious interaction – a phenomenon warranting further investigation by strategic communication scholars. Distinguishing between the effects of “vicarious interaction” and direct interaction could have significant consequences for the study of relational or symmetrical approaches to social media.