When co-production fails: the role of customer's internal attributions and impression management concerns

Contrary to the expected notion of self-serving bias, co-production researchers have found that when co-produced products and services fail, customers internally attribute the failures to themselves. We examine the influence of different internal attributions on customers’ future behavioral intentions. Two independent experiments using two different types of co-production stimulus show that effort and ability attributions have different effects on customer's intentions regarding co-production in the future. Furthermore, the customer perspective of ability as fixed vs. learnable, influences the effects of ability attribution. Elucidating the underlying mechanism of these effects, we investigate co-production situations, wherein the stimulus of social presence can trigger impression management and reduce the avoidance goal orientation that emerges after failure when ability is seen as difficult to develop