The Effects of Tip Recommendations on Customer Tipping, Satisfaction, Repatronage, and Spending

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Alexander, Damon; Boone, Christopher; Lynn, Michael
• 署名单位: Cornell University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2019.3541
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 146-165
• 关键词: tipping; customer satisfaction; Customer retention; customer spending; tip recommendations

摘要

A field experiment involving 94,571 orders from 24,637 customers of an appbased laundry pick-up, cleaning, and delivery service examined the effects of various randomly assigned tip recommendations on consumers' tip amounts, satisfaction ratings, frequency of return, and bill size. We find that tip recommendations affect tip amounts, but not customer satisfaction, patronage frequency, or bill size, which implies that neither the processes underlying the tip-recommendation effects on tipping nor consumer tipping itself affect these other consumer outcomes. From a practical perspective, these results and conclusions inform efforts to increase or decrease tipping. Recommending larger tip amounts, at least within the $2-$10 or 5%-25% ranges studied here, appears to be a safe means of increasing the amounts customers leave. More generally, altering customers' tipping behavior will not itself adversely affect those customers' subsequent satisfaction, repatronage, or spending, as long as the means used to alter tipping do not directly affect these other outcomes.