Limitations and Future Research

A possible limitation of this study is the type of respondents used, which students accounted for almost all respondents. This result might not be exactly fit the whole society. Another possible limitation is that the respondents may not involve in the experiment enough. Since they were not under the real situations of purchasing, or they were going to do something later, the respondents might not focus on the

designing task. Besides, the experimental involvement of respondents is important for measuring the reliable data, especially for the studies about customization. One paradox for conducting an experiment about customization is that researcher may want to design a real-life scenario which may cause the respondent lose patient. The more real scenario

will make respondents involve more, but it costs more time.

A counter-argument is proposed that encouraging customer to expand efforts in participation may not always be an attractive strategy because of the self-serving bias (Bendapudi & Leone, 2003). The self-serving bias refers to a person’s tendency to claim more credits than a partner for success and less blame for failure in a situation in which an outcome is jointly produced (Wolosin, Sherman, & Till, 1973). Leone et al.

(2003) have also proposed that increasing a customer’s autonomy may reduce the self-serving bias. The effect of customer participation on product evaluation may need more and further research.

Another suggestion is that the attitudes toward the customer participation in co-design shall be measured and studied in future research. Purchase intention can be possibly taken into the model as a dependent variable, since there were already some studies discussing about the effects of store information or attitudes toward the brand on purchase intention (Dodds, Monroe, & Grewal, 1991; Spears & Singh, 2004)

It is recommended to add “price” as an independent variable in the future research, since the product with higher price has a higher symbolic value in the daily life. The author also proposes that there might be different effect of different product type on the relationship between customer participation and satisfactions. For instance, is it still suitable or workable to provide an easy example when customers are involving

with customizing a conspicuous good?

Except asking the customer to design images on the T-shirt, there are some other levels of participation, such as requiring customers designing the whole T-shirt

including choosing the fabrics. If the designing process is more complicated, is the easy example still effective on reducing the perceived difficulty?

Another related topic is the relationship between customer participation and perceived product quality. Carroll and Thomas (1988) suggested that we could clarify the concepts of easy to use and fun to use when talking about software quality, which referred the ergonomic quality and hedonic quality respectively. It would be interesting to know that the participation from customers will increase more perceived functional quality or hedonic quality, therefore the effects of customer participation on

satisfactions would be more clarified.

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