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The collaborative economy (CE), and within it, collaborative consumption (CC) has become a central element of the global economy and has substantially disrupted service markets (e.g. accommodation and individual transportation). The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends and develop future scenarios for market structures in the CE. This allows service providers and public policy makers to better prepare for potential future disruption.

Thought experiments – theoretically grounded in population ecology (PE) – are used to extrapolate future scenarios beyond the boundaries of existing observations.

The patterns suggested by PE forecast developmental trajectories of CE leading to one of the following three future scenarios of market structures: the centrally orchestrated CE, the social bubbles CE, and the decentralized autonomous CE.

The purpose of this research was to create CE future scenarios in 2050 to stretch one’s consideration of possible futures. What unfolds in the next decade and beyond could be similar, a variation of or entirely different than those described.

Public policy makers need to consider how regulations – often designed for a time when existing technologies were inconceivable – can remain relevant for the developing CE. This research reveals challenges including distribution of power, insularity, and social compensation mechanisms that need consideration across states and national borders.

This research tests the robustness of assumptions used today for significant, plausible market changes in the future. It provides considerable value in exploring challenges for public policy given the broad societal, economic, and political implications of the present market predictions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key drivers of share of wallet for credit cards issued by either a credit union (CU) or bank using a Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR) framework.

A survey approach engaging 1,649 current CU members at nine CUs regarding their use of 3,487 different credit cards is employed. Binary logistic regression is used to discriminate when CU issued vs bank issued credit cards are perceived to be “best” by their owners.

This research indicates the key drivers differ significantly when CU members prefer a CU-issued credit card vs a bank-issued credit card. For example, CU-issued credit cards are attractive to some CU members because of prior relationships with the CU and offering lower interest rates on revolving balances. By contrast, customers who choose a bank-issued credit card are much more likely to be driven by the rewards offered on the card.

Using the WAR key driver approach, managers can identify differentiating attributes that influence customers’ perceptions of their rank vis-à-vis competition and thereby grow share.

This research provides a significant contribution to both the banking literature and the scientific literature by examining the robustness of a relative metrics approach within the retail banking and CU market. It represents the first empirical analysis of a WAR key driver approach in the scientific literature.

The needs of CMOs to utilize a firm's data productively in order to support decision-making combined with the reported benefits of enterprise feedback management solutions has resulted in a rapid rise in usage and valuation of EFM providers. The explicit promise of EFM providers is improved financial performance, whereas there is no scientific research investigating this link. To investigate the link between EFM usage and financial performance is core of this research.

To gain insight into this link survey data from 127 US-based firms on their usage of EFM platforms was linked to their stock market performance over several years.

This research did not find any significant positive relationships between different aspects of EFM usage investigated and stock returns. It is important to note that these results should not be taken as validation that EFM systems do not result in positive financial outcomes for firms. It may be that superior market performance as measured through stock returns is difficult to observe through a cross-sectional analysis. Instead these results indicate that superior market performance as measured through stock market performance is not an obvious, generalizable outcome for firms that have adopted EFM systems.

EFM has rapidly grown across many consumer facing industries, with EFM platform providers receiving very high market valuations on relatively small revenue streams. This is one of the first scientific papers to study the usage and impact of these EFM systems.

Managers seeking to manage customer word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior need to understand how different attitudinal drivers (e.g. satisfaction, positive and negative emotion, commitment, and self-brand connection) relate to a range of WOM behaviors. They also need to know how the effects of these drivers are moderated by customer characteristics (e.g. gender, age, income, country). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To investigate these issues a built a large-scale multi-national database was created that includes attitudinal drivers, customer characteristics, and a full range of WOM behaviors, involving both the sending and receiving of both positive and negative WOM, with both strong and weak ties. The combination of sending-receiving, positive-negative and strong ties-weak ties results in a typology of eight distinct WOM behaviors. The investigation explores the drivers of those behaviors, and their moderators, using a hierarchical Bayes model in which all WOM behaviors are simultaneously modeled.

Among the many important findings uncovered are: the most effective way to drive all positive WOM behaviors is through maximizing affective commitment and positive emotions; minimizing negative emotions and ensuring that customers are satisfied lowers all negative WOM behaviors; all other attitudinal drivers have lower or even mixed effects on the different WOM behaviors; and customer characteristics can have a surprisingly large impact on how attitudes affect different WOM behaviors.

These findings have important managerial implications for promotion (which attitudes should be stimulated to produce the desired WOM behavior) and segmentation (how should marketing efforts change, based on segments defined by customer characteristics).

This research points to the myriad of factors that enhance positive and reduce negative word-of-mouth, and the importance of accounting for customer heterogeneity in assessing the likely impact of attitudinal drivers on word-of-mouth behaviors.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the role that service firms can play to improve societal health and create symbiotic value, defined as value created as a result of collaborative relationships between the firm, its employees, customers and the communities in which it operates.

This manuscript examines the case of Millennials as they make up a dominant portion of the current workforce in society and proposes a conceptual framework for symbiotic value creation.

This study identifies the need to develop supporting mechanisms for the growing role of Millennials as employees and members of society that ultimately, in turn, create symbiotic value.

The paper proposes an integrative framework beyond the traditional and siloed examination of linkages between employee, customer, firm and society, creating new opportunities for extending a service theory and practice.

This paper aims to propose that the literature on customer engagement has emphasized the benefits of customer engagement to the firm and, to a large extent, ignored the customers’ perspective. By drawing upon co-creation and other literature, this paper attempts to alleviate this gap by proposing a strategic framework that aligns both the customer and firm perspectives in successfully creating engagement that generates value for both the customer and the bottom line.

A strategic framework is proposed that includes the necessary firm resources, data, process, timeline and goals for engagement, and captures customers’ motives, situational factors and preferred engagement styles.

The authors argue that sustainability of data-driven customer engagement requires a dynamic and iterative value generation process involving customers recognizing the value of engagement behaviours and firm’s ability to capture and passing value back to customers.

This paper proposes a dynamic strategic value-creation framework that comprehensively captures both the customer and firm perspectives to data-driven customer engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight challenges for service firms communicating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) efforts to customers. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship between ESG metrics and reporting and customer perceptions of social innovativeness.

The empirical material comprises three years of data (2018–2020) covering more than 100 firms from three sources: (1) Social Innovation Index (Sii), which is collected as part of the American Innovation Index (Aii), (2) Bloomberg Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) ESG and (3) Datamaran.

ESG metrics and reporting do not suffice to explain customer perceptions of social innovativeness. Rather, a firm's industry plays the prominent role in affecting these perceptions where service firms are at a disadvantage as customers perceive services as less socially innovative compared to goods.

While ESG metrics and reporting provide important information for investors and regulators, they are not reflected in customers' perceptions of firms' social innovativeness, and services are at a disadvantage relative to goods. Therefore, services researchers and managers must advance their knowledge regarding how to better link ESG metrics and report to customers' perceptions.

The paper offers a first large-scale, cross-industry investigation of how ESG metrics and reporting impact customer perceptions of social innovativeness, leading to a research agenda on communication of ESG.

Responding to an increasing call for a more comprehensive conceptualization of customer delight, the purpose of this paper is to expand the theory of customer delight and to examine the implications of such an expanded view for service theory and practice.

This paper presents the results of three qualitative studies. The first study explores customer delight through self-reported consumption experiences in customer-selected contexts, followed by one-on-one in-depth interviews. The second involves focus groups and the third examines self-reported incidents of delightful customer experiences.

This research finds that customer delight goes beyond extreme satisfaction and joy and surprise to include six properties that—individually or in combination—characterize customer delight. An expanded conceptualization of how customer delight can be defined is proposed in which customer delight is associated with various combinations of six properties – the customer experiencing positive emotions, interacting with others, successful problem-solving, engaging customer’s senses, timing of the events and sense of control that characterizes the customer's encounter.

It is clear from the findings of this research that there is no single property that is associated with delight. Through the facilitation of multiple properties, managers have the potential to create a multitude of routes to delight. It is recommended that future research (1) identify and explicate these alternative routes for engendering delight using the six properties identified, and (2) develop a general typology based on service context and characteristics, customer segment, etc. that further stimulates scholarship on delight, and offers more industry-specific insights for managers.

Insights from this investigation will encourage managers and service designers to think more broadly and creatively about delight. Doing so will open up new opportunities for achieving customer delight, beyond merely focusing on extreme satisfaction or surprise and joy strategies currently dominating discussions of customer delight.

This paper makes several contributions to the service literature. First, it extends current conceptualizations of customer delight and offers an expanded definition. Next, it demonstrates how this new understanding extends the existing literature on delight. Finally, it proposes an agenda for future delight research and discusses managerial implications, opening up new opportunities for firms to design delightful customer experiences.

As an interdisciplinary and applied discipline, managerial relevance has always been at the forefront of service research. This viewpoint article synthesizes the main ideas presented in one of the 10th SERVSIG conference panels by three practitioners about what they view as the biggest opportunities/challenges they face and two journal editors on current academic research priorities. The purpose of this study is to use this panel as a starting point to bridge more closely the world of academia with practice and propose a collection of recommendations toward this goal.

This study synthesizes the academic and practitioner viewpoints presented and research conducted into research priorities.

Although there is significant overlap in what is deemed important by the presenting academics and practitioners, there are some important differences when it comes to issues deemed important, how they are articulated and the language that is used.

This paper contributes to the literature and practitioner community by summarizing the viewpoints of the two sides and curating a collection of existing approaches and new recommendations to more closely bridge academic and practitioner perspectives.