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The optimal level of customer participation is an important factor in service design. However, researchers know little about the impact of customer participation for their willingness to pay and hence organizations’ financial outcomes. This paper examines the impact of customer participation in a pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing system, allowing customers to pay any price they want for a product or service.

This paper reports the results of three experiments, in which the authors manipulated the level of customer participation (Study 1: Low versus high, Study 2: Medium versus high, Study 3: Low versus medium versus high) and measured customers' PWYW payments (Studies 1–3), customer satisfaction (Studies 1–3), perceived equity (Study 3) and perceived enjoyment (Study 3). Studies 1 and 3 were scenario-based experiments, while study 2 was a field experiment. Study 3 was preregistered.

The results support a direct effect of customer participation in service production on customer PWYW payments, yet only when comparing low to high levels of customer participation. High levels of customer participation lead to a decrease in perceived equity and an increase in perceived enjoyment, which in turn spilled over to customer PWYW payments through customer satisfaction.

This research provides causal evidence at the individual level of analysis for the relationship between customer participation in service production and financial results. The paper also provides insights into its underlying mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how service employee’s perceived customer participation influences beneficial deep acting behaviors among service personnel while dampening the development of the less-beneficial surface acting, which subsequently affects service employees’ work engagement. Specifically, the current research explores how the personal factors of customer orientation (CO) and employee-customer fit interact with the customer participation to ultimately develop either surface – or deep-acting behaviors.

Data for the study were collected from a cross-sectional sample of retail bank and insurance companies in South Korea. Questionnaires were distributed to 750 frontline employees of several banks and insurance companies. Of these, 518 questionnaires were used for further analysis.

The results indicate that perceived customer participation exhibits the predicted negative influence on surface acting as well as the positive effect on deep acting. Using the hierarchical moderated regression approach, the interaction effect of customer participation and CO on the service employees’ surface acting was found. Finally, the positive moderating effect of employee’s perceived fit with customers in the relationship between perceived customer participation and employees’ deep acting was supported.

First, the specific service sectors chosen for this study are retail banking and insurance. Furthermore, the study was conducted among the frontline employees of banks and insurance companies in South Korea. Second, the study used single-source data, which are prone to common method variance. While the survey instrument was structured carefully with this in mind and the results suggested that method bias may not have been an issue in this study, this problem can best be avoided by collecting data from multiple sources. Third, this study is limited by its cross-sectional approach. The cross-sectional nature of the present study does not allow causal inferences.

This study provides a practical implication for managers to understand the importance of customer participation for relieving the negative effects of employee emotional labor. From a practitioner standpoint, examining the relationship between customer participation and emotional labor is of great importance given the benefits and costs associated with managing customer participation. Thus, managers should magnify the positive effect of perceived customer participation on emotional labor by increasing frontline employees’ understanding of customer participation. Second, the finding that CO plays a more critical role in the reduction of surface acting has important managerial implications. The recruitment and selection of frontline employees should incorporate an assessment of the level of CO. The results of this study strongly suggest that service organizations can greatly benefit from hiring individuals with a higher CO for frontline positions because CO signals a better job-person fit.

The present study is the first to link employees’ perceived customer participation with their attempts at emotional labor at work and to study how those attempts lead to work engagement. This research also shows that understanding how service employees’ CO moderates the effects of customer participation on beneficial deep acting and on destructive surface acting is important in that emotional labor is a potential driver of customers’ emotional states and subsequent assessments of service interaction. A third contribution of this study is the use of a new concept, which will be called person-customer fit (PCF), to reflect employees’ perceived fit with customers. Although many researchers have investigated the relationship between customers and frontline employees, the research has primarily focussed on the employees’ perceived fit with their organization and members of the organization and overlooked the importance of PCF.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether two different participation strategies (i.e. deep participation and broad participation) in a supplier’s product development process will result in different levels of customer-perceived value. In addition, this paper examines the moderating effects of customer risk-aversion and technology turbulence on the relationship between customer participation depth/breadth and customer-perceived value.

A theory-based model is developed and tested using data collected from 196 business-to-business firms. A multiple-regression approach was used to test the hypotheses.

Drawing on the transaction cost theory, the results reveal that while deep participation is likely to result in increased customer-perceived value, broad participation may hurt the relationship performance by reducing customer-perceived value. Moreover, the findings suggest that these effects are contingent on at least two contextual factors: how risk-averse the customer is and how turbulent the technological environment is.

This study is among the first to disaggregate the customer participation process into two different strategies, namely, deep participation and broad participation. It also extends the current literature by providing more insights about the dynamics involved in the customer participation process.

This study aims to answer the following question: How can customer readiness be instrumental in non-technology-based service delivery?

Using a field study, this research examines the role of customer readiness in customer participation in non-technology-based service delivery and its indirect effects on such customer outcomes as perceived service quality, customer satisfaction and customer willingness to recommend.

The results show that customer readiness is a second-order construct. It has a significant impact on customer participation in service delivery, which in turn impacts three key service outcomes: customer perceived service quality, customer satisfaction and customer willingness to recommend. Four factors influencing customer readiness (consumer previous experience, consumer desire for control, consumer perceived risk and customer organizational socialization) are also empirically evaluated.

Some limitations of the study are related to sample size and use of a type of services. The research tested 13 hypotheses with a limited sample size in one context. A better representation of the population and a more generalizable outcome require more representative samples and studies in various contexts such as banking, hotel services or health care services. This study demonstrated the importance of customer readiness for effective participation in non-technology-based service delivery; it does not address the impact of customer readiness on participation in the context of technology-based services. Future research may also shed light on when and why customers choose technology-based services versus non-technology-based services.

Effective customer participation in service delivery can, and should, benefit from boosting customer readiness.

This research shows the impact of customer readiness on non-technology-based service delivery, more specifically, the impact of customer readiness on customer participation in this type of service delivery. Customer readiness has been found to be beneficial in the provision of technology-based services; yet, its role in the provision of non-technology-based services has not been thoroughly evaluated.

For service providers, whether customers can act the role of partial employees when participating in the service production and delivery process is a subject that has been receiving conflicting explanations and has not been analysed empirically. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between customer participation and service providers' perceived workload. Empirical results of survey data collected from 293 customer‐contact employees at 64 restaurants in Taiwan indicate that customer participation is positively related to service providers' perceived workload, which implies that it is inappropriate to decrease the number of service employees based on service designs that include customer participation. Implications of these findings for managing customer participation, as well as future research directions, are subsequently discussed.

A distinct view of customer participation in services classifies the characteristics of the participation process as experience- versus outcome-oriented, each of which affects customer participation success uniquely for different types of services (utilitarian vs hedonic). This study aims to investigate if service managers should differentiate and focus on distinct characteristics according to the service types.

Two consumer experiments serve to assess the potential moderating effect of service type on consumer preferences for experience- versus outcome-oriented forms of customer participation.

The two empirical studies affirm the proposed moderating effect of service type on the effect of experience- and outcome-oriented customer participation characteristics. Experience-oriented characteristics work better for hedonic than for utilitarian services, and one study confirms a stronger positive effect of outcome-oriented characteristics for utilitarian services.

Further research should replicate the experimental findings with a field study. Furthermore, continued research could analyze the mediators of the interaction of co-production characteristics with the service type in greater detail.

Managers can design the characteristics of the customer participation processes according to the nature of the service (hedonic vs utilitarian) and, thus, maximize customers’ willingness to pay.

This study offers a new perspective on customers’ reactions to customer participation in services: depending on the service type or situation in which a service is being consumed, different customer participation characteristics lead to (financial) success.

To enhance their competitive advantage, firms are increasingly regarding customer-perceived value as a vital factor in advancing the level of service performance. This paper aims to explore how supermarket retailers select and implement market orientation (MO) and service innovation strategies to enhance customer-perceived value based on their investment.

A review of the related literature indicated that studies have rarely explored the meanings and outcomes of MO and service innovation. Therefore, this paper examined the roles of MO and service innovation, evaluating how these factors affected relationship quality and customer-perceived value in a supermarket context. Customer advocacy and customer participation were evaluated as the mediating variables, and six hypotheses were formulated. The data were collected by conducting a questionnaire survey of the customers from five of the largest Taiwanese supermarket retailers. A structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses based on the respondent sample data.

The results indicated that customer participation and relationship quality are positively related to customer-perceived value. Customer advocacy is positively related to customer participation and relationship quality. MO and service innovation are positively related to customer advocacy.

The high explanatory power of the results of the deduced model in this research help explain the MO and service innovation of supermarket retailers toward customers. However, the collection of data related to other retailers requires consumers in other countries to test the robustness of this theoretical model. The results of analyses conducted on other industries and in other countries may differ.

This paper investigated how the MO and service innovation capabilities of supermarket retailers contributed to their customer advocacy to achieve superior customer participation, customer relationship quality and customer-perceived value.

This paper investigates the effect of MO and service innovation on relationship quality and perceived value, and regards customer advocacy and customer participation as mediators.

This study aims to investigate how customers' perception of service innovation aspects (innovativeness, service newness and relative advantage) and their participation impact value perception, satisfaction and loyalty.

The conceptual model was tested using a nationwide survey from 430 Australian customers of Uber, using structural equation modeling.

Results show that customer participation (CP) and innovativeness positively influence perceived value. Satisfaction is positively influenced by perceived value, innovativeness and relative advantage. Both perceived value and satisfaction drive loyalty. Yet, CP did not influence satisfaction. The study’s findings generally support the mediating roles of perceived value and satisfaction.

Cross-sectional data were used. Thus, the results only provide a snapshot of the relationships among constructs.

To promote loyalty, service organizations emphasize how innovative aspects of services (innovativeness and relative advantage) can create value and satisfaction. Also, CP is critical in promoting customer perceived value and loyalty.

Building on service-dominant logic (SDL), this study proposes a conceptual model investigating how perceived innovative aspects of service and CP influence perceived value, satisfaction and loyalty of service organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of customer participation on role behaviors and customer satisfaction. The mediating role of role stressors is also examined.

Based on literature reviews, a survey of 317 bank customers was conducted in Central China, using a structured questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis to test research hypotheses.

The current work found that the inconsistency between the role expectations from participating customers and service providers would increase the customer perceived role stress. Therefore, customer participating width and depth can affect customer satisfaction in two different ways. On the one hand, role stressors (i.e. role ambiguity and role conflict) in customer participation have a negative effect on customer compliance, decreasing customer satisfaction. On the other hand, role stressors have a positive effect on customer creativity, increasing customer satisfaction.

No prior studies, thus far, have examined how customer perceived role stressors in service participation affect customers’ role performance and satisfaction in the service process. The current research identifies the characteristics of customer participation from the perspectives of task role set. On the basis of role stressor theory, this research examines the effects of customer participation width and depth on customer satisfaction using customer perceived role stressors as mediating variables. This research also investigates the mixed effect of role stressors on customer satisfaction. It provides empirical support for the role of customers as “co-creators” by distinguishing customers’ creative behaviors from customer compliance and finds the positive effect of role stressors on customer satisfaction via customer creativity.

To reduce costs, many banks have increased customer involvement during the creation and delivery of their products and services. Based on a job demands-resources (JD-R) model, this study tests an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship between perceived customer participation and employee work engagement. Customer orientation (CO) and service employee perceived fit with customers (PCF) moderate this relationship, which eventually affect both the internal and external benefits of service-employee work engagement.

The authors collected survey data from 518 service employees in the South Korean banking and insurance industries and analyzed the data using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results indicate that perceived customer participation (PCP) has a significant inverted U-shape effect on work engagement. Results also suggest that CO and PCF have positive relationships with work engagement. In addition, they moderate the inverted U-shaped relationship between service employee PCP and work engagement, while work engagement positively affects organizational citizenship, job satisfaction and commitment.

The authors empirically identify a curvilinear effect of PCP on work engagement. In doing so, the authors introduce and operationalize the new construct: PCF and suggest PCF and CO as unique job resources for service employees. The authors also examine these constructs as predictors based on a motivational process and as moderators based on a strain (energetic) process.

From a managerial perspective, examining the curvilinear relationships of customer participation and work engagement suggests that front-line employees’ (FLEs’) PCP does not necessarily enhance the economic benefits of productivity gains by using customers as substitutes for portions of employee labor. Another finding with managerial relevance indicates that service employees, who have more CO and PCF, showed more tolerant attitudes toward unnecessary and excessive levels of customer participation and regarded it as a job resource.

This study explains that researchers must consider the positive and negative sides of customer participation simultaneously because frontline employee PCP can be changed depending on the level of participation provided by customers. This study also shows that CO can be assumed as a personal resource and PCF as an environmental resource in the work engagement process.