Firms’ adoption of self-service technology: how managerial beliefs shape co-production decisions

The level of service co-production offered to customers through self-service technologies (SSTs) is an important marketing decision. The extant literature reports numerous benefits of SSTs for firms, such as increasing efficiency, reducing costs, boosting loyalty, and reaching new customer segments. However, industry evidence suggests that firms vary in their adoption of SSTs. This article utilizes a managerial cognition perspective to relate the level of SST-based co-production to configurations of beliefs about desired organizational outcomes, customers, and knowledge. The resulting belief model illuminates why firms vary in their utilization of SSTs, and has implications for the judgment of newness of SST-based services, the ethics and politics of customer representation in SST design, and epistemologies of SST-based market exchanges. © 2016, Academy of Marketing Science.