Penalty-Reward-Contrast Analysis: a review of its application in customer satisfaction research

It is widely observed that researchers use Penalty-Reward-Contrast Analysis (PRCA) to identify the asymmetric influences of product/service attributes on overall customer satisfaction, since it readily adapts to typical customer satisfaction data. However, there is no consensus on its application phases. An extensive literature review of PRCA revealed differences in three main issues: (1) definition of low and high performance levels; (2) decision on the regression coefficients (standardised or unstandardised) for penalty and reward values and (3) classification of the attributes. Therefore, in this study, the authors aim to contribute to the existing literature by proposing a standardised process for PRCA application. Moreover, by using the data on a case study, the authors intended to show that different applications may also produce different findings from the same research data.