A Motivation Account of Co-Creation Effect: The Role of Regulatory Focus on Consumer Willingness to Pay for Co-Creation Activities: An Abstract

As consumption increasingly shifts to experience-based, offers of cocreation in product design, production, and even service recovery are on the rise. In this research, we provide a motivation-based framework that helps reconcile the inconsistent empirical findings in the literature and offers a clearer understanding of customer cocreation and its effects. We demonstrate that cocreation can be a double-edged sword as the effort input can be considered either a disutility or an opportunity depending on consumer motivations. Consumers’ motivation (regulatory focus) and shopping orientation toward the process versus outcome component of a cocreation activity create a regulatory fit effect, such that those with a promotion focus match with a process shopping orientation and those with a prevention focus match with an outcome shopping orientation to enhance willingness to pay (Studies 1A and 1B). This is because promotion-focused consumers are more sensitive to the process experience while prevention-focused consumers are more sensitive to the attractiveness of the outcome. Furthermore, based on this fit effect, consumers with different motivations may vary in their response to cocreation task characteristics such as the degree of autonomy and complexity of the task. Consumers with a promotion (prevention) orientation are more (less) willing to pay for a cocreation activity when it offers more freedom (vs. more structured, study 2) and the task requires more (vs. less) effort (study 3). The studies incorporated a series of cocreation activities including assembling Legos, piecing puzzles, makings crafts, and baking. This research offers theoretical contribution in understanding the effect of cocreation as well as managerial implications in cocreation service design.