Kristina Wittkowski

The burdens of ownership: reasons for preferring renting

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to identify and assess the importance of proposed determinants of the growing consumer preference for renting consumer goods, as opposed to the actual transfer of ownership.Design/methodology/approach – Following a qualitative preliminary study and a literature review, six factors are identified as possible determinants of a preference for non‐ownership modes of consumption. These are examined in a quantitative study using a sample of 461 members of a German online peer‐to‐peer sharing network. Hypotheses regarding the proposed determinants are tested using factor analysis and structural equation modelling.Findings – The results show that the demand for non‐ownership services is negatively influenced by “possession importance” (the importance that a consumer attaches to full ownership) and positively influenced by “trend orientation” and “convenience orientation”. The other proposed determinants – “experience orientation”, “price consciousness”, and “environmentalism...

Contagious Effects of Customer Misbehavior in Access-Based Services

Customer misbehavior in service settings is problematic for two reasons: (1) because of the direct damage it causes and (2) because of additional negative effects that arise from the contagion of such misbehavior. The authors extend existing theory of customer misbehavior by studying its contagious effect. The investigation focuses on access-based services, defined as transactions in which multiple consumers successively gain temporal, short-term access to a good, while legal ownership remains with the service provider (e.g., car sharing and fashion rentals). Due to the nature of these services, they are especially prone to indirect customer misbehavior, which is directed at the accessed product and occurs in the absence of others. Two online experiments provide the first empirical evidence for a contagiousness of misbehavior and reveal that this effect is driven by customers’ perceptions of the social norms among the customer group. Moreover, they indicate that greater strength of the accessed product’s brand as well as lower anonymity of the accessed product’s owner attenuate contagion. A field experiment shows that an increase in the communal identification among access-based service customers reverses the contagious effect, with customers more likely to remove signs of previous users’ misbehavior. The results suggest that access-based service providers should address customer misbehavior by (a) investing in the products they offer access to, (b) establishing more personal relationships with customers, and, foremost, (c) increasing communal identification among customers.

Firms’ Intentions to Use Nonownership Services:

In this study, we investigate why companies intend to use nonownership services by conducting qualitative interviews with 10 experts to develop our hypotheses, then using a survey to test them. Our findings show that, as hypothesized, firms’ intentions to use nonownership services are affected by both financial (i.e., tax efficiency and cash and liquid asset management) and nonfinancial (i.e., control over assets and access to the latest technology and tools) factors, with access to the latest technology and tools being the most important driver. Furthermore, we show that the effect that the desire to gain access to the latest technology and tools has on intentions to use nonownership services is enhanced (i.e., moderated) when firms wish to reduce the risk of obsolescence. The hypothesized moderation effect of firm size on the importance of cash and liquid asset management is marginally significant. These findings are an important contribution to the literature, as previous studies have almost exclusively focused on the financial drivers of nonownership service use.

Relational Price Discounts: Consumers’ Metacognitions and Nonlinear Effects of Initial Discounts on Customer Retention

Practitioners increasingly employ relational price discounts by granting initial discounts to new customers with the goal of building sustainable relationships. However, extant research has provided mixed findings on the long-term effects of initial discounts on customer retention. The current research aims to reconcile this mixed evidence by exploring nonlinear effects of initial discounts on customer retention. Drawing on marketplace metacognition theory, the authors hypothesize that moderate initial discounts (5%–35%) have positive effects on customer retention, whereas low (<5%) and high (>35%) discounts have negative effects. Two large-scale field studies in an insurance companys car insurance branch and property insurance branch provide empirical support for the hypothesized patterns. An additional laboratory experiment tests the psychological mechanism underlying the nonlinear effects. When compared with low and high discounts, moderate initial discounts lead customers to form higher expectations of future relational benefits provided by the firm, as well as to lower their expectations of future discounts. Finally, this research offers customer lifetime value implications based on the depicted findings.