Incorporating Self-Serve Technology into Co-Production Designs

Co-production, which is the direct involvement of customers in the design, delivery, and marketing of goods and services that they themselves consume, implies customer-firm collaboration. The nature of this collaboration, however, is highly dependent on the organization's service design, which increasingly includes Internet-based, self-serve technology (SST). While there is considerable research on service design, most of this research fails to consider the role and implications of information technology in co-production. In order to remedy this shortcoming, we build on prior research to develop a contingency theory of co-production design. Using cases of Internet-based SST (e.g., online airline reservations and recommendation-based sales systems), we highlight the unintended consequences of implementing SST in the different co-production designs. In this way, our research contributes to our understanding of information technology's implications for co-production.