Service attribute prioritization based on the marginal utility of attribute performance

Abstract

Service attribute prioritization is a key basis for developing service quality improvement strategies. Previous studies prioritize attributes by assigning them into different strategy intervals, which make it difficult to determine the priority of attributes in the same interval. To solve this problem, some studies calculate the satisfaction of each attribute. However, this approach may cause systematic errors in calculating the satisfaction of each attribute. Accordingly, this paper proposes a new method for prioritizing service attributes by constructing an overall satisfaction (utility) function and calculating the marginal utility under current attribute performance. The validation of restaurant review data on TripAdvisor and comparison experiments with other methods show the effectiveness and advantages of this method.