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Prior research has clearly shown that ethnocentric consumers favor local brands. However, consumers also strongly favor local and global brands which reinforce their desired self-images. The purpose of this paper is to examine how self-image congruence (SIC) mediates the effect of consumer ethnocentrism (CE) on local brand preference (LBP).

This study empirically tested the proposed mediation model across three countries (Taiwan, South Korea and Japan) using ten brands from two very different product categories (beer and personal computers). Research subjects were randomly selected and placed into one of four groups for each of these countries. Subjects in these groups were asked to compare well-known domestic and global brands which were either culturally similar or culturally dissimilar.

CE significantly impacted LBP among Taiwan, South Korea and Japan college-aged consumers but this impact was limited. SIC, however, had a powerful influence on LBP for these consumers. The cultural similarity and relative necessity of brand choices had almost no effect on the results.

Researchers and practitioners need to more fully understand the contingencies Asian consumers use in selecting local brands. Under some scenarios, CE may not be a reliable predictor of local brands preference.

This is one of the first studies to demonstrate the influential role of SIC among consumers from collectivistic cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the critical role that context plays in measuring service quality.

This study replicated an experiment methodology to show that customers perceive an airline service drama as a sequence of scenes. A series of focus groups were then conducted to identify the context-specific set of service quality expectations that customers hold for each of these scenes. Finally, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), a mathematical modeling technique, was applied to these findings to graphically illustrate how customer expectations for airline service quality vary by service scene.

Results from this study indicate that static measures of service quality are apparently inadequate in explaining customer expectations during more enduring service encounters. The FCA hierarchical model developed in this study revealed profound differences in customer service expectations across the six airline service scenes. These results suggest that more advanced methods for measuring service quality are necessary for service encounters that are longer in duration.

This research brings into question a broad spectrum of research which fails to recognize that customers use different reference points in time to evaluate service quality.

Researchers and practitioners need accurate and reliable measures of service quality but the findings suggests that measurement specificity and diagnostic capability should not be sacrificed in the pursuit of more robust instruments.

This is the first study to empirically demonstrate that customers perceive the airline service encounter as a sequence of scenes. It is also the first study to mathematically model service quality dimensions using FCA.

This study seeks to illustrate empirically how person‐situation variants influence customer assessments of service quality across multiple stages in the service drama.

Using surveys that were systematically distributed to 3,000 passengers boarding 30 different flights (with 432 complete responses), the effects of consumption motive (hedonic versus utilitarian) and service duration (shorter versus longer service encounters) were examined in relationship to perceived time pressure within a multiple‐sequence service encounter.

The results indicate that the consumption motives (utilitarian‐hedonic) of passengers do influence perceptions of service quality, as well as altering perceived time pressure resulting from service delays. Also, the length of the service duration moderates the negative effects of time pressure on perceived service quality.

Extrapolating the findings from this research to other service industries should be done with care given that consumption motives and perceived time pressures may vary greatly across different service industries.

This study suggests that managers must develop systemic solutions to service delays during early stages of the encounter as such delays may prompt a “domino effect” that transcends all subsequent stages in the service encounter. Service encounters that are longer in duration may also be more susceptible to critical service evaluations if these delays are not rectified.

This study demonstrates the critical issue of measuring service quality during each successive stage of a service encounter.

Many service employees rely on non-contractual voluntary customer tips as a major source of their income. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the relationship between the service employee’s cognitive evaluation of the tip (expectations-disconfirmation tip gap), affective state (AS) and displayed emotions (DE) toward customers in the workplace.

An experimental, between-subjects, scenario-based research design was conducted on 107 waiters in the US restaurant industry. A simple mediation model was first tested, before testing a more complex moderated mediation model that was developed to investigate if employees self-control (SC) moderates the relationship between the employees tip gap, AS, and DE.

An employee’s negative disconfirmation tip gap negatively influences the employee’s AS, which in turn results in negative DE toward customers in the workplace. However, an employee’s positive tip gap does not positively influence the employee’s AS, relative to the control. In addition, employees’ SC does not moderate the relationship, which suggests that when employees experience negative tip disconfirmation they may openly violate the service provider’s display rules and service scripts, and display negative emotions toward customers in the workplace.

The scenario-based research design was limited to self-reported perceived levels of SC and DE. The scenario was also limited to one country and one tipping context (i.e. restaurants). Future studies could compliment these findings by conducting both qualitative studies, and survey research that relies on actual tipping data or re-enactments of actual service encounters.

Service managers not only need to manage display rules and service scripts to influence employee DE, but also need to manage employee tip expectations, especially when employees expect to receive tips that are greater than actual tips (i.e. negative disconfirmation). Communicating and educating employees on customer tipping and what tips to expect should be central to managing employees who rely on customer tips.

Tipping has received very little attention in the services management literature. This study broadens the focus of tipping research in the literature by presenting a more complex expectations-disconfirmation tip gap model.

This paper aims to investigate user health information seeking and sharing patterns and content in an online diabetes community and explore the similarities and differences in the ways and themes they expressed.

Multiple methods are applied to analyze the expressions and themes that users seek and share based on large-scale text data in an online diabetes community. First, a text classifier using deep learning method is performed based on the expression category this study developed. Second, statistical and social network analyses are used to measure the popularity and compare differences between expressions. Third, topic modeling, manual coding and similarity analysis are used to mining topics and thematic similarity between seeking and sharing threads.

There are four different ways users seek and share in online health communities (OHCs) including informational seeking, situational seeking, objective information sharing and experiential information sharing. The results indicate that threads with self-disclosure could receive more replies and attract more users to contribute. This study also examines the 10 topics that were discussed for information seeking and 14 topics for information sharing. They shared three discussion themes: self-management, medication and symptoms. Information about symptoms can be largely matched between seeking and sharing threads while there is less overlap in self-management and medication categories.

Being different from previous studies that mainly describe one type of health information behavior, this paper analyzes user health information seeking and sharing behaviors in OHCs and investigates whether there is a correspondence or discrepancy between expressions and information users spontaneously seek and share in OHCs.

The ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the subsequent perception of threat have shifted consumer perceptions and evaluations of service experiences. This paper aims to investigate how customers’ service evaluation is shared as customer reviews following the pandemic and the heightened perception of threat. In doing so, this research particularly investigates the shifts in the textual contents of online reviews.

This study used the textual contents in the online reviews posted on Hotels.com for 1,497 hotels in New York City for empirical analysis. In total, 109,190 observations were used for the analysis.

By analyzing actual online review data from an online review platform for hotel services, this study finds that the text reviews generated after the pandemic outbreak tend to contain words with stronger negative emotions. In terms of the pronoun choice, this study further finds that the use of “I” increases while the use of “we” decreases.

This research adds to the existing literature on service evaluation and online customer reviews by showing that there are shifts in the expressions used to communicate service evaluation through online text reviews, including the degree of emotionality and pronoun usage. Because potential customers are likely to rely on online reviews for their own decisions, the findings suggest that it is important for practitioners to be aware of such shifts and respond accordingly.