<b>Research Note</b>—The Influences of Online Service Technologies and Task Complexity on Efficiency and Personalization
Authors: Xu, Jingjun (David); Benbasat, Izak; Cenfetelli, Ronald T.
Journal: Information Systems Research (2014)
<jats:p> Online retailers are increasingly providing service technologies, such as technology-based and human-based services, to assist customers with their shopping. Despite the prevalence of these service technologies and the scholarly recognition of their importance, surprisingly little empirical research has examined the fundamental differences among them. Consequently, little is known about the factors that may favor the use of one type of service technology over another. In this paper, we propose the Model of Online Service Technologies (MOST) to theorize that the capacity of a service provider to accommodate the variability of customer inputs into the service process is the key difference among various types of service technologies. We posit two types of input variability: Service Provider-Elicited Variability (SPEV), where variability is determined in advance by the service provider; and User-Initiated Variability (UIV), where customers determine variability in the service process. We also theorize about the role of task complexity in changing the effectiveness of service technologies. We then empirically investigate the impact of service technologies that possess differen…