Stopping the Spread: The Role of Blame Attributions and Service Provider Measures in Curbing C2C Misbehavior Contagion: An Abstract

Customer misbehavior is part of the daily business of service firms. Generally understood as acts that disrupt service encounters and violate generally accepted codes of conduct, customer misbehavior occurs regularly and with varying degrees of severity across service sectors. Traditionally, research on customer misbehavior has focused on misbehavior that is either targeted at the service provider, the frontline service staff, or the service provider’s property. However, service encounters today are increasingly characterized by customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions in which customers regularly become targets of other customers’ misbehavior. Despite its increasing prevalence, research on C2C misbehavior remains very limited today. This spareness is even more concerning given that previous research provides initial evidence of the contagiousness of customer misbehavior in access-based settings. Yet it remains unclear whether this contagiousness likewise translates to other contexts and forms of misbehavior, and what service providers can do to effectively curb its spread and attenuate potential negative firm evaluations. Three online experiments in the context of Airbnb, gym and transportation services reveal that provider-directed blame attributions mediate the contagiousness of C2C misbehavior. That is, C2C misbehavior spreads because customers blame the service provider for the wrongdoings of other customers; regardless of whether this misbehavior is targeted towards another customer’s personal belongings or at other customers directly. Moreover, our results indicate that preventative and interventive service provider measures can effectively reduce blame attributions which, in turn, attenuate negative customer attitudes towards the firm while simultaneously curbing subsequent C2C misbehavior. By explicating the central role blame attributions play in the spread of C2C misbehavior, this study extends previous research on customer misbehavior and misbehavior contagiousness. Managerially, this research provides firms with explicit guidance on how to tackle the spread of C2C misbehavior and reduce negative firm evaluations with targeted measures. Overall, our findings provide first experimental evidence that tackling the spread of C2C misbehavior is both possible and advisable with targeted provider measures.