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Technological innovations such as smart mobile devices and mobile applications gave rise to a new business model: collaborative consumption. This business model, which is receiving significant attention from researchers and practitioners, is characterized by an intermediating digital platform that facilitates exchanges between customers and peer service providers. However, many digital platform providers still fail to build a critical mass of demand and supply. Accordingly, the aim of this research is to develop a better understanding of the barriers perceived by both customers and peer service providers.

This study uses a mixed-method qualitative approach to develop a comprehensive understanding of the factors that explain the rejection of collaborative consumption. In particular, six focus groups and 14 in-depth interviews were conducted, totaling 50 Belgian participants (with a mean age of 33 years). In addition, 375 online critical incidents—retrieved from various sources, such as review websites and social networks—were used for triangulation purposes. All data were analyzed using a thematic analytic approach.

Customers and peer service providers reject collaborative consumption because of a complex set of multidimensional functional and psychological barriers. In particular, actors may perceive barriers related to complexity, value, risk, compatibility, contamination, image, and responsibility, which prevent them from participating in collaborative consumption.

This paper builds theory on the reasons why both customers and peer service providers reject collaborative consumption. The research identifies several barriers that were not captured in prior research. Digital platform providers can use the research findings to more fully understand actors' decision-making processes in collaborative consumption.

Customers might become concerned about getting contaminated and adapt their behavior accordingly, which is of critical concern for service managers. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, this paper synthesizes the extant body of research within psychology and marketing into an integrative framework that helps understand the current state of knowledge on contamination. Second, this review summarizes evidence-based managerial recommendations on how to deal with customers' contamination concerns. Third, this paper provides guidance for future research by proposing several ways in which those concerns might influence service management.

This paper conducts an integrative literature review of over 30 years of psychology and marketing research on contamination concerns.

The paper reviews physical and metaphysical contagion models, the situational cues that may activate customers' contamination concerns, the psychological mechanisms that underlie the relationship between contamination and customer outcomes and the individual characteristics that influence customer sensitivity to contamination cues. Moreover, this review identifies actions that service managers can take to prevent customers' contamination concerns. Finally, still much has to be learned about how organizations should deal with fear of contamination by the time a next pandemic breaks out.

This paper develops an integrative framework that serves as a structured knowledge map onto the contamination phenomenon and paves the way for future service research.

Despite an increasing body of research on value co-creation through social media, service organizations still face difficulties in leveraging the potential of social media communication to facilitate value co-creation with multiple stakeholders. This article addresses this challenge by adopting a multistakeholder, communication perspective.

This article uses a conceptual approach and builds upon concepts widely recognized in the public relations (PR) literature to assess communication in multistakeholder social media-mediated exchanges.

This article discusses the role of social media communication in enabling value co-creation as well as the communicative challenges that come along with it. Moreover, applying PR academic insights to the service innovation and service recovery research fields, it advances theoretical propositions that predict how service organizations can successfully build upon the social media communication fundamentals – namely dialogue, engagement, social presence and conversational human voice – to trigger value co-creation with and among multiple stakeholders.

This article introduces selected relevant theoretical concepts from the PR field and develops novel theoretical propositions that are likely to make unique contributions to the service management field. The article also advances future research avenues that will help service and communication scholars together move the field forward.

Organizations increasingly develop and offer sharing services enabled by means of product-service systems (PSS). However, organizations offering sharing-based PSS face a unique set of design challenges and operational risks. The purpose of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with customer-based insights into service delivery system design and risk management for sharing-based PSS operational success.

This qualitative study combines in-depth interviews with supplementary, multidisciplinary literature and secondary firm data. In total, the authors conducted 56 semi-structured interviews with diverse customers across different business-to-customer (B2C) PSS settings.

First, the authors develop an integrative conceptual framework that reveals what structural and infrastructural design choices customer expect organizations to make for mitigating risks and enhancing customer-perceived value in the sharing economy. These design choices may influence customers' trust and control perceptions in all actors involved in the service delivery system. Second, the results suggest that sharing value proposition, customer-perceived level of consequentiality and level of customer-supplied resources are contingency factors that need to be considered when making design decisions for risk management in the sharing economy.

This study extends Sampson's Unified Service Theory by proposing that, with sharing-based PSS, production flows from customers to customers. This situation creates unique challenges for operations management. This paper extends current understanding of the role, characteristics and contingencies of service delivery system design for risk management in the sharing economy. In doing so, authors challenge common wisdom and suggest understanding both the organizational and customers' individual contexts is critical for (contingency) theory and practice.

The relationship between frontline employee work engagement and customer service evaluations is a major theme in service research. Recent studies have called for further exploration and validation of this relationship. This paper conceptually replicates the work engagement-customer service evaluations link within the context of technology-mediated voice-to-voice encounters. Moreover, we extend prior work by examining how work engagement influences customer service evaluations depending on the outcome of the service encounter (positive or negative).

The authors conducted a multilevel, multi-source study involving data from 4,198 customer interactions and 346 employees at a major European telecom operator. The data were analyzed using a linear mixed effects model.

The study could not replicate the relationship between work engagement and customer service evaluations in technology-mediated voice-to-voice encounters. The findings reveal that customers who interacted with a highly engaged employee but received a negative service outcome evaluated the interaction more negatively than those who interacted with a less engaged employee. Conversely, when the service outcome was positive, work engagement was not significantly related to customer service evaluations.

In voice-to-voice encounters, employee engagement appears to have little impact on customer service evaluations and can even be detrimental when the service outcome is negative. This study is among the first to empirically demonstrate a negative effect of work engagement on customer service evaluations. Future replication studies are needed to validate these findings.

Today's sharing economy covers a variety of business models. This research aims to (1) identify dimensions along which sharing businesses may vary and (2) investigate how these dimensions influence consumer engagement while considering consumers' sustainability orientation.

This research relies upon a systematic literature review (n = 67 articles) to identify five sharing business dimensions: (1) ownership transfer, (2) professional involvement, (3) compensation, (4) digitalization and (5) community scope. A discrete choice conjoint experiment in the fashion industry is employed to investigate how these dimensions affect consumer engagement with sharing businesses (n = 383 participants).

The results suggest that ownership of tangible resources elicits more engagement than access to tangible resources for both consumers with a low sustainability orientation and consumers with a high sustainability orientation. Community scope also affects consumer engagement as reflected in more engagement towards sharing businesses with a local rather than a global scope. The presence of professional service providers, monetary compensation and a digital platform only induces engagement among consumers with a low sustainability orientation.

This research generates a better understanding of how sharing businesses can draw on business dimensions to engage consumers with different levels of sustainability orientation and, in turn, how sharing businesses can realize their economic and/or circular potential.

Smart technologies and connected objects are rapidly changing the organizational frontline. Yet, our understanding of how these technologies infuse service encounters remains limited. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to update existing classifications of Frontline Service Technology (FST) infusion. Moreover, the authors discuss three promising smart and connected technologies – conversational agents, extended reality (XR) and blockchain technology – and their respective implications for customers, frontline employees and service organizations.

This paper uses a conceptual approach integrating existing work on FST infusion with artificial intelligence, robotics, XR and blockchain literature, while also building on insights gathered through expert interviews and focus group conversations with members of two service research centers.

The authors define FST and propose a set of FST infusion archetypes at the organizational frontline. Additionally, the authors develop future research directions focused on understanding how conversational agents, XR and blockchain technology will impact service.

This paper updates and extends existing classifications of FST, while paving the road for further work on FST infusion.

This paper aims to provide a conceptual understanding of the drivers and outcomes of actor opportunism in the context of the three key actors of the sharing economy – the service provider, the platform and the consumer.

The research uses a conceptual approach by drawing on literature from within and outside of marketing.

The current research introduces a conceptual framework of opportunism in the sharing economy with seven underlying propositions. The framework posits a U-shaped moderating effect of social capital for the relationship between opportunism and its drivers, actor vulnerability and asset specificity. Furthermore, a 2 × 2 matrix consisting of two types of opportunistic behaviors (active and passive) and two coping strategies by other actors (defensive and nondefensive) suggests that passive opportunism tends to lead to value codestruction independently of the coping strategies employed by other actors. Counterintuitively, the combination of active opportunism and defensive coping strategy presents an opportunity for value cocreation due to its potential to break up older structures and generate new ones.

While our research provides a higher-level understanding of opportunism pertaining to platform, consumers and service providers in the sharing economy, future research could situate our framework within specific regulatory environments, incorporate the role of competitors and examine individual interaction effects between type of opportunism and coping strategies.

The framework enables service providers, platforms and consumers to identify drivers of opportunistic behaviors of their partners and discern instances in which opportunistic behaviors lead to value codestruction for all actors.

This research transcends prior work on the bright and dark sides of the sharing economy by identifying its dynamic nature and examining the contributing role of opportunism.

Customers often experience negative emotions during service experiences. The ways that employees manage customers’ emotions and impressions about whether the service provider is concerned for them in such emotionally charged service encounters (ECSEs) is crucial, considering the criticality of the encounter. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, this study proposes that two key competencies – employee emotional competence (EEC) and employee technical competence (ETC) – affect negative customer emotions and customer satisfaction with employee response in ECSEs.

This study relies on a video-based experiment that depicts a customer involved in an ECSE as a service provider delivers bad news to him. The hypothesis tests use a two-way independent analysis of covariance.

Both emotional and technical competencies must be displayed to improve the customer experience in an ECSE. When EEC is low, ETC does not decrease negative customer emotions or increase customer satisfaction with employee response. When EEC is high, ETC instead has a significant impact on both customer outcomes.

Managers must train employees to develop both technical and emotional competencies. Employees who demonstrate only one type cannot temper customers’ emotions or enhance their perceptions of the employees’ response as well as can those strong in both competencies.

Using a video-based experiment, this study examines the moderating role of EEC in the relationship between ETC and two key aspects of the customers’ experience in an ECSE (negative customer emotions and customer satisfaction with employee responses) following the delivery of bad news.

Previous research suggests that the compensation offered to customers after a service failure has to be substantial to make customer satisfaction surpass that of an error-free service. However, with the right service recovery strategy, it might be possible to reduce compensation size while maintaining happy customers. The aim of the current study is to test whether an anchoring technique can be used to achieve this goal.

After experiencing a service failure, participants were told that there is a standard size of the compensation for service failures. The size of this standard was different depending on condition. Thereafter, participants were asked how much they would demand to be satisfied with their customer experience.

The compensation demand was relatively high on average (1,000–1,400 SEK, ≈ $120). However, telling the participants that customers typically receive 200 SEK as compensation reduced their demand to about 800 SEK (Experiment 1)—an anchoring effect. Moreover, a precise anchoring point (a typical compensation of 247 SEK) generated a lower demand than rounded anchoring points, even when the rounded anchoring point was lower (200 SEK) than the precise counterpart (Experiment 2)—a precision effect.

Setting a low compensation standard—yet allowing customers to actually receive compensations above the standard—can make customers more satisfied while also saving resources in demand-what-you-want service recovery situations, in particular when the compensation standard is a precise value.