The impact of choice on fairness in the context of service recovery

Purpose – The paper proposes introducing a new antecedent to service recovery – that is customers' choice over some components of the service delivery process. The authors also examined the interactive effects of tangible compensation and apology on perceived fairness in a context of restaurant services.Design/methodology/approach – A 2 (choice) × 2 (compensation) × 2 (apology) between‐subjects design was used to test the hypotheses. Subjects were exposed to a written scenario describing a restaurant experience. A total of 280 undergraduate students served as the subject pool.Findings – The study results indicate that choice, compensation and apology jointly influence customers' perceptions of informational fairness. The combined effects of apology and compensation were observed for interactional fairness, whereas only main effects were found for distributive justice. Finally, the findings suggest that the four facets of justice (distributive, procedural, interactive, and informational) are highly linked ...

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