The Effect of Customer Empowerment on Adherence to Expert Advice

Nuno Camacho, Martijn de Jong and Stefan Stremersch ()

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: Customers often receive expert advice related to their health, finances, taxes or legal procedures, to name just a few. A noble stance taken by some is that experts should empower customers to make their own decisions. In this article, we distinguish informational from decisional empowerment and study whether empowerment leads customers to adhere more or less to expert advice. We empirically test our model using a unique dataset involving 11,735 respondents in 17 countries on four continents. In the context of consumer adherence to doctors’ therapy advice (patient non-adherence to doctor advice may cost about $564 billion globally to the pharmaceutical industry every year), we find that decisional empowerment lowers adherence to expert advice. The effect of informational empowerment varies predictably across cultures and is only universally beneficial when initiated by the customer. These findings have important implications for professional service providers.

Keywords: relationship; services marketing; expert services; professional services; advice-taking; advice-giving; adherence to expert advice; empowerment; delegation; international marketing research; cross-cultural studies; health marketing; consumer behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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