| The importance of understanding customer value and the process of enabling the co-creation of value has advanced to the point of being considered vital for marketing and organizational success. Presently, a gap in the literature exists that pertains to understanding how the design and management of mechanisms that enable co-creation processes effect co-produced customer value and, consequently, performance outcomes. By investigating how two specific elements of customer participation enabling platforms, choice and degree of participation, impact customer value and performance outcomes in an online context, this study helps address the extant research gap. Specifically, this study examines how choice and degree of participation impact satisfaction and willingness to engage in future co-production through the development of individual, relational, and economic value. In addition, this study contributes to a broader understanding of the sources of value developed through the experience of customer participation.;Using data collected from 314 users of financial service websites, this study found that simply offering a choice for customers to use a website based service to co-produce a service or to have an employee of the service complete the service for them enhances individual, relational, and economic value for customers who chose to engage in co-producing the service. A higher degree of participation in the co-production context was also found to enhance the three sources of co-created value. Also, the importance of enhanced value for customers is illustrated by the finding that value fully mediates the relationship between choice and degree of participation, respectively, and the performance outcomes of satisfaction and willingness to engage in future co-production. Each value creation source investigated in this study was found to strongly affect the performance outcomes. |
