The role of fairness in modelling customer choice

Some business practices of service firms have the potential to negatively affect customer demand because they are perceived as unfair. We discuss how fairness concerns can influence customer choice, and propose a conceptualisation embedded in expected utility theory that accounts for fairness judgments. The intended contributions are (1) to advance the literature on customer decision making by combining expected utility theory with justice (fairness) theory; (2) to provide a conceptual framework capturing fairness in customer choice; and (3) to propose a research agenda concerning fairness in customer decision making.