| Author: | Liang, Ce |
| Title: | The effect of materially referenced tip recommendations on tipping behavior |
| Advisors: | Jiang, Yuwei (MM) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Department: | Department of Management and Marketing |
| Pages: | xii, 110 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Since tips function as an important source of income for a vast number of service employees and serve as an effective financial incentive for numerous businesses in the service sector, nudging customers to tip has become increasingly ubiquitous in the business world. Thanks to the rapid evolution and widespread adoption of mobile Internet and digital payment collection systems, the practice of exposing customers to tip recommendations, as one way to increase tips, has gradually gained traction among companies in the service industry. However, past research has overly concentrated on number-only tip recommendations and how to increase the effectiveness of such tip recommendations through manipulating the numerical attributes of the suggested tip amount. More importantly, the prior literature has failed to draw a definitive conclusion regarding the most effective design of such number-only tip recommendations. This thesis thus fills an important void regarding how to design effective tip recommendations by examining the effectiveness of a newly emerging yet not widely adopted design of tip recommendations—materially referenced tip recommendations (i.e., depicting a product that financially equals the suggested tip amount). In this thesis, Chapter 1 first provides a brief and concise summary of the entire research. Chapter 2 begins with a comprehensive review of existing literature on tipping behavior, the motives behind tipping, the design of tip recommendations, outcome simulation, and meaningfulness, followed by the establishment of the theoretical framework and the development of hypotheses regarding the research question. Moving to Chapter 3, I present the results of nine experiments, which demonstrate that an easily implemented design of tip recommendations—adding materially referenced items to tip recommendations—prompts tipping. This effect persists whether the material references are presented pictorially or verbally, and is sequentially mediated by the more vivid outcome simulation and higher perceived meaningfulness of the tipping behavior. More importantly, the effect is mitigated when customers undergo high cognitive load, when consumers suspect companies of engaging in tip theft, or when the referenced product is irrelevant to the focal service context. Furthermore, I empirically rule out various alternative explanations for the observed effect, including more negative self-attribution, shortened psychological distance between the customer and the server, higher perceived communality of the customer–server relationship, higher perceived novelty of tipping experiences, the discrepancy between the perceived financial value of referenced goods and the suggested tip amount, higher level of customer engagement, customers’ stronger affective reactions, and lower level of pain of payment. Finally, Chapter 4 delves into the important theoretical contributions and the managerial implications of the research, in addition to summarizing findings and discussing future research avenues. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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