Tell Me What You Want: Exploring the Impact of Offering Option Repertoires on Service Performance in Gig Economy

Abstract

Confronted with an increasingly competitive business landscape for credence goods in the gig economy, sellers in e-marketplaces must effectively design their services by configuring the service offering specification options to enhance the visibility of their service offerings. Motivated by the gap between the configuration of service offering specification options and its impact on service quality and sales, this study builds on the competitive repertoire theory to advance a research model that seeks to unveil how the volume, complexity, and heterogeneity of service offering specification option repertoires affect service quality and sales. We empirically examined our hypotheses with a dataset comprising 3,307 lifestyle-themed credence goods observations from Fiverr, one of the largest e-marketplaces for gig economy in the world. We discover that the repertoire volume increases both service quality and sales whereas repertoire complexity only increases service quality. Repertoire heterogeneity does not significantly impact on service quality and sales.