An online survey of MTurk workers was used to obtain measures of average tipping likelihood as well as worker and service characteristics for each of 108 service occupations. Examination of the occupation-level relationships among these variables indicated that U.S. consumers are more likely to tip occupations to the extent that: the server-customer relationship is important, the server is subordinate to the customer, the server-customer interaction is brief, the customer can monitor server efforts more easily than can managers, the service is customized, the customer is wealthier than the server, and the server handles the bill. Managers can use these findings to (i) anticipate the likely success of counter-normative tipping policies when deciding whether or not to adopt such policies, and (ii) design messages and efforts to reduce consumer resistance to counter-normative tipping policies when they are adopted.

Introduction

Hospitality and other service workers around the world often receive voluntary gifts of money (aka, “tips,” “propinas,” “trinkgelds,” etc…) from their customers. This consumer behavior is guided by social norms that specify whom to tip and how much to tip them, but service firms do not have to passively accept the dictates of those norms. Some service firms and their managers may want to encourage tipping in situations where it is rare in the hopes of attracting and retaining better service workers (Lynn et al., 2011), motivating those workers to provide more personalized service (Kwortnik et al., 2009), reducing consumer perceptions of service expensiveness (Lynn and Wang, 2013), and/or reducing commissions paid to landlords or distributors (Lynn and Withiam, 2008). Others may want to discourage tipping in situations where it is common in order to reduce or eliminate employees’ role conflict (Eddleston et al., 2002), giving away of goods and services without charging for them (Brady et al., 2012), discrimination in service delivery against customers perceived to be poor tippers (Barkan and Israeli, 2004; Brewster, 2015), and under-reporting of tip income (Anderson and Bodvarsson, 2005). In fact, recent examples of corporate efforts to shape tipping include Marriott Hotels’ distribution of tip envelopes to encourage tipping of its maids (Harpaz, 2014), Frontier airlines’ inclusion of a tipping option on its digital billing tablets to encourage tipping of its stewardesses (Berger, 2019), and Union Square Hospitality Group’s elimination of tipping at its restaurants (Walker, 2018).