Abstract

Prof. Hean Tat Keh’s research dispels the widely-received wisdom that a universal distinguishing characteristic of services lies in the inseparability between service production and consumption. He conceptually argues that in many instances, services can be separable. The interesting question is how do customers react when they are faced with both separated and unseparated modes of delivery for the same core service (e.g., having a meal at a restaurant or ordering take-out service)? He finds that consumers first weigh the trade-off between the advantages of service separation (i.e., access convenience and benefit convenience) and its drawbacks (i.e., performance risk and psychology risk), which, in turn, affect perceived value. Further details are available at http://www.aimresearch.org/index.php?page=alias-32.