Willingness to pay for professional services

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to build a model to help understand consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for professional services. In this paper, professional services are services where, in general, consumers have the choice of doing the work themselves or outsourcing them such as apparel care, landscaping and tax forms preparation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper proposes a regression model to predict WTP. The model includes a set of independent behavioral variables such as subjective knowledge, job anxiety, enjoyment and appreciation of leisure activities. Data from two cross‐sectional surveys completed by 488 and 479 consumers are used to test the proposed model.FindingsThe findings support the importance of behavioral variables as determinants of consumers' WTP for professional services.Practical implicationsUnderstanding which behavioral variables predict consumers' WTP for professional services provides insightful implications. The findings imply that, to increase WTP for professional services, service providers may consider stressing in their promotional messages how much better the outcome is when they (versus consumers) produce the service, and making the importance of leisure activities and the related value of time more salient to consumers.Originality/valueUnlike previous models, designed to measure WTP and which focus on demographic and economic variables, this model introduces a set of behavioral variables. The findings support the importance of these variables in predicting WTP.