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The purpose of this paper is to examine customers’ use experiences in a smartphone application (app) context. Apps have emerged as popular tools among marketing practitioners. In service research, however, smartphone apps, and their customers’ use experiences, have received limited attention.

This paper provides a conceptual overview and draws on an empirical two-phase study comprising diary narratives of using a specific app and semi-structured interviews on the use of multiple apps by app users.

Results show that indirect use experiences play an important role in the holistic service experience. Compared with direct experiences, indirect use experiences do not require the actual use of apps or direct contact with the user. Also the context, such as the time and location of app use, is important for both direct and indirect use experience.

This paper highlights indirect use experiences as a vital component of service experiences and encourages researchers not to restrict use experiences to direct use only. Indirect use experiences enable managers to gain deep insights into the everyday use experiences of current and potential customers.

First, previous research on service experience has mainly focused on direct use experiences. This study highlights that indirect use experiences are an important part of the service experience. Second, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first attempt to investigate the use experiences of smartphone apps in a service marketing context.

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.

The purpose of this study is to examine how direct-negative and indirect-negative contact experiences affect students' attitudes toward the police by race and test the mediation effect of social distance on the relationship.

Using the data collected from two US 4-year public universities, this study employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the impacts of the key variables, direct-negative and indirect-negative contact experience, on the students' attitudes toward the police. This study also tests whether indirect negative contact with the police is a stronger factor than direct negative contacts among racial/ethnic minority people.

Results show that both direct-negative and indirect-negative contacts are stronger predictors of the dependent variable. In particular, the indirect-negative contact has significant direct and indirect effects through social distance on the dependent variable in racial minorities. The study also shows that indirect contact more strongly affects racial minorities than direct-negative contact experiences do.

This study is the first sophisticatedly to examine students' negative contact experiences into two variables: direct-negative and indirect-negative contacts with the police.

This study aims to explore the reaction of consumers to a new package design through differing levels of experience. It examines how consumers' expectation of product quality change as the consumer's experience with the package moves from indirect to direct.

Respondents evaluated a new package design at indirect, moderately direct, and direct levels of experience. Factor analysis was also conducted to determine what dimensions consumers use for evaluation.

This study revealed three major findings. First, consumers evaluate a new package on the two dimensions of “ease of use” and “ease of handling”. Second, the type of experience with the package has a significant effect on the consumers' attitude toward the package and the quality assessment of the product inside. Third, consumers' expectations of product quality and package ease of use have a positive association with purchase intention for all types of product‐related experience.

This paper provides insight into how consumers respond to products when the packaging has changed to a new design.

Hoping to increase the productivity of their employees, firms provide and expect their employees to use approved mobile apps. However, despite an intuitive appeal, the relationship between information technology usage and productivity is still seen as paradoxical. This study examines the relationship between employees' experience and engagement with business mobile apps provided by employers and its effects on employee work productivity.

Data from respondents who use employer-provided business apps were used to test the hypotheses. Measurement-corrected latent scores extracted from the PLS measurement evaluation were used in regression-centric assessment using PROCESS.

Results indicate that employee-users’ experience-based attributions of the business app, i.e. customization, performance quality and compatibility, have positive effects on productivity mediated by participation intensity. Further, work type (retail vs non-retail) and the depth of the employee user’s experience moderate experience-based attributions' indirect effects on productivity.

Unlike previous studies delving into this topic, this study focuses solely on the mediation and moderation effects for hypothesis testing. Specifically, this study investigates effects conditional on work type (retail vs non-retail), which the authors believe has significant implications for retailing. These findings have interesting implications for both future research and managers.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) employees constitute one of the largest, but least studied, minority groups in the workforce. This article examines what we know, and what we need to know, about the career and workplace experiences of this understudied population. The construct of sexual identity is defined, followed by a review of the research on sexual orientation in the workplace. Then an analysis of the differences between LGB employees and other stigmatized groups is presented. Three unique challenges facing LGB employees are identified, and conceptual models are developed that explain underlying processes. Finally, career theories are critically analyzed, and an identity-based longitudinal theory of LGB careers is presented.

This study uses a diverse sample of residents living in Northern California to study factors that are associated with public perceptions of police bias. The authors also investigate whether perceptions of racial discrimination mediate the relationships between race/ethnicity and perceptions of police bias.

The sampling frame of the study was constructed through two stages. First, the frame included 212 census tracts in the study setting that comprise the study population. The authors stratified the census tracts by using demographic information from the most recent American Community Survey. The authors also used a multi-mode address-based design in which a household adult was invited through mail to participate in a web-based survey.

The authors found that racial/ethnic minorities (i.e. Latino, African American and Asian respondents) were more likely to experience racism and report police as biased than White residents. Racial and ethnic disparities in assessments of police bias, however, disappeared when controlling for direct and indirect experiences of racism, suggesting that experiences with racism are key factors explaining variations in perception of police bias across racial/ethnic groups.

The generalizability of the findings is unclear. Future research should focus on multiple cities to advance the understanding of perceptions of police bias. Second, the measures of direct and indirect experiences with racism do not identify the source of the problematic encounters, and thus the authors are unaware of the experiences respondents had with police officers.

This paper includes the implications for the perceptions of police bias and how to improve police-citizen interactions.

This paper will facilitate ongoing debate on police-citizens interactions. Specifically, how experiences of racism can improve the understanding of bias toward the police.

This paper fulfills an research need to study perceptions of police bias among diverse immigrant populations.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework for the effects of prior task experience on team creativity. We distinguish among different types of experience within teams, namely direct and indirect prior task experience. We argue that different types of prior task experience differentially influence team creativity, and that the prior experience–creativity relationship is mediated by the development and use of transactive memory systems (TMS). We also argue that team characteristics such as identity and communication moderate the effect of prior task experience on TMS, and task characteristics such as uncertainty and interdependence moderate the effect of TMS on group creativity.

Focal service providers increasingly involve customers in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties. The present study investigates how customers' outsourcing decisions affect the formation of the waiting experience with the focal service provider, by which the objective waiting time, environmental quality and interactional quality act as focal drivers.

To test our hypotheses in the context of cancer care, we gathered process data and experience data by means of a patient observation template (n = 640) and a patient survey (n = 487). The combined data (n = 377) were analyzed using Bayesian models.

This study shows that opting for a service triad (i.e. outsourcing non-core services to a third party) deduces customers' attention away from the objective waiting time with the focal service provider but not from the environmental and interactional quality offered by the focal service provider. When the type of service triad coordination is considered, we observe similar effects for a focal service provider-coordinated service triad while in a customer-coordinated service triad the interactional quality is the sole experience driver of waiting experiences that remains significant.

By investigating the implications of customer participation in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties, this research contributes to the service design, service triad and service operations literature. Specifically, this study shows that customer outsourcing decisions impact waiting experience formation with the focal service provider.

In a largely exploratory study, the authors investigate: how do managers’ experiences with exogenous hazards (e.g., natural disaster risk) affect their identification of those hazards as salient to the firm? This analysis is based on an international survey of 575 managers across 18 disaster-prone countries. The authors examine whether and how locational hazard risk and managerial experience influence the identification of natural disaster risk as an important firm issue. The authors find that locational natural hazard risk, and direct and indirect experience with natural disasters, increases the likelihood that managers’ will identify firm-specific natural disaster risk as an important firm issue. In addition, the authors also find that managers are likely to identify natural hazards as a threat when natural hazard risk is high and when managers have experience in natural disasters that directly affected their businesses.