Importance Weights in Service Engineering : A Commentary on Research Opportunities

Multi-criteria decision making methods are often used in situations that involve comparing the performance of multiple service designs. These methods construct an overall performance measure comprising a weighted function of different, possibly conflicting, objectives. The weights are usually estimates of the 'importance' of the corresponding objective to performance. Little is known about what contributes to variations in assigned importance weights in service process decision-making. In this paper, we seek to motivate research addressing: What influences importance weights assigned to service process variables? The paper uses managerial and consumer decision-making literature to propose some factors that influence importance weights, and will suggest opportunities for further research