Consumer retaliation and responses to perceived unfairness: The effect of relationship quality

When consumers perceive themselves to be unfairly treated by service firms, they may consider retaliation to be an appropriate mechanism for restoring fairness. In broad terms, retaliation in a service setting is defined as an effort to punish a service firm and to cause it inconvenience for the damages it has caused. Understanding what leads consumers to retaliate is important because this response can have disastrous consequences on the reputation and profitability of a firm. Despite the managerial importance of this phenomenon, marketing literature has devoted limited attention to the conceptualization of retaliation and the understanding of its psychological functioning. In order to address this important gap, this dissertation examines the phenomenon of retaliation in a service failure context, and explains its causes and effects on consumer responses.; This research also contributes to marketing literature by examining the effects of a relationship on consumer retaliation. Two rival explanations exist as to the effect of a relationship on retaliation: the "love is blind" versus the "love becomes hate" effects. The "love is blind" effect suggests that strong relationship consumers are more likely to forgive an unfair experience, and as a result they are less likely to retaliate. On the other hand, the "love becomes hate" effect argues that strong relationship consumers tend to retaliate more vigorously because they experience greater betrayal. In order to reconcile these two rival explanations, this dissertation suggests that the effect of a relationship is contingent upon the attributions consumers make about the cause of an unfair service failure. When consumers infer that a firm has little control over an incident, the "love is blind" rationale explains the effect of a relationship on a consumer's desire for retaliation. On the other hand, when consumers attribute a service failure to controllable factors, the "love becomes hate" effect applies to the situation.; Two surveys based on retrospective experiences are examined in order to test the hypotheses of this research. Both studies found that anger is the emotional prototype that leads consumers to experience a desire for retaliation, which in turn becomes a strong predictor of the behaviors that aim to hurt, directly or indirectly, the business of a firm. Empirical evidence also indicates that the effect of a relationship on the desire for retaliation is contingent upon the attributions made about a firm's controllability, and that strong relationship consumers experience greater betrayal after unfair service failures.