Purpose
This paper aims to explore the physical attractiveness stereotype in service encounters. Specifically, this paper examines how physical attractiveness affects a customer’s response and whether a customer’s social interaction anxiety and the consumption situation moderate this relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
Three experiments were used to test hypotheses. Participants were subject to scenarios of varying levels of physical attractiveness (more vs less), social interaction anxiety (high vs low) and consumption situation (private vs public). Customer participation intention and citizenship behavior were measured along scales.
Findings
The results indicate that the physical attractiveness of service providers positively affects customer citizenship behavior, and customer participation intention mediates this relationship. However, the effect only exists for a customer with low social interaction anxiety or presents itself under public consumption conditions.
Research limitations/implications
This work paints a more nuanced picture of missing links in the understanding of the influence of service providers’ physical attractiveness. It enriches the physical attractiveness stereotype literature by identifying the mediating role of customer participation intention while bounding the relationship within conditions related to a customer’s social interaction anxiety and the service consumption situation.
Practical implications
Management may alter the performance of service employees by considering the employee’s physical attractiveness and gauging customer social interaction anxiety while keeping in mind the consumption situation.
Originality/value
This study advances physical attractiveness stereotype research by examining its effect on customer participation intention and citizenship behavior in the service industry. Additionally, this study adds customer social interaction anxiety and consumption situation to the existing literature that addresses employee factors affecting customer behavior.
Information asymmetry between backers and project creators impedes the crowdfunding success. Consequently, creators usually rely on various information to alleviate information asymmetry. Particularly, the location information of both backers and creators embodies their geographic and cultural distance, which may affect crowdfunding project attractiveness. Whereas current literature almost ignores the role cultural distance in crowdfunding, this research focuses on the reward-based crowdfunding, so that it becomes salient to form the appreciation and judgment of the innovative, creative, or artistic nature of projects. Meanwhile, geographic distance is examined to join the debates between flat world hypothesis and home bias proposition. A series of econometric models are examined based on a sample of 264 fundraising projects collected from Kitckstarter.com through Python program. Results show that cultural distance exerts a U-shape effect, which initially impedes the crowdfunding performance but promote projects when large enough. Geographic distance generally exerts insignificant impact on crowdfunding performance. Furthermore, cultural and geographic distance exerts the asymmetric effects on experienced versus new backers. This article underscores the important implications of cultural distance on reward-based crowdfunding. By showing the differential effects of cultural and geographic distance on experience versus new backers, it empirically infers the social capital as the underlying mechanism.
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