Neeli Bendapudi & Robert P. Leone

Psychological Implications of
Customer Participation in
Co-Production
Customer participation in the production of goods and services appears to be growing. The marketing literature has largely focused on the economic implications of this trend and has not addressed customers' potential psychological responses to participation. The authors draw on the social psychological literature on the self-serving bias and conduct two studies to examine the effects of participation on customer satisfaction. Study 1 shows that consistent with the self-serving bias, given an identical outcome, customer satisfaction with a firm differs depending on whether a customer participates in production. Study 2 shows that providing customers a choice in whether to participate mitigates the self-serving bias when the outcome is worse than expected. The authors present theoretical and practical implications and provide directions for further research.

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ustomers increasingly are being encouraged to take on more active roles in producing goods and services. They go into photography stores and use machines to crop, enlarge, correct, or enhance their photographs; check themselves in and out of hotels; and even routinely scan and bag their own groceries at supermarkets.
Customer participation per se is not new. Supermarkets, which are models of customer co-production with customers selecting, carting, and transporting groceries, date to the
1930s. What is new is the recognition that encouraging customers to be "co-producers" in this sense is the next frontier in competitive effectiveness. We are seeing the emergence of the "customizing consumer" (Moyers 1989)—consumers who examine market offerings and create a customized consumption experience for themselves (Firat, Dholakia, and
Venkatesh 1995). On the basis of this trend. Lovelock and