ABSTRACT
The role of the customer as co-producer of services has never been in sharper focus. Though consumers have always co-created the services they receive, interest in the co-production has grown as marketers have been encouraged to view customer input to service provision as a potential source of competitive advantage (LengnickHall 1996; Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000). The rise of technologies which enable ever greater possibilities for co-production have intensified this focus (e.g., Meuter et al. 2005), as has the increasing recognition that some co-production is simply unavoidable in many if not most service contexts, and in many exchanges not originally regarded as entailing a service component (Vargo and Lusch 2004).
