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1. Introduction
“Customers are always right” is a widely known aphorism among marketers. They generally believe that pleasing customers is a paramount factor for business success and are willing to transfer bargaining power to their customers, who are more demanding than before. With such strong bargaining power, many customers are reluctant to comply with organizational regulations and norms that dictate appropriate behavior in a service encounter (i.e. jaycustomers) (Fisk et al., 2010). As such, the outcome of pleasing customers deviates from marketers’ expectations with regard to better business performance. Instead, jaycustomer behaviors, in turn, impose detrimental effects on other customers, employees and organizations (Reynolds and Harris, 2006). For instance, a customer who misbehaves affects other customers’ willingness to stay with the service provider and their satisfaction with the service experiences. In their interactions with jaycustomers, employees suffered psychologically and physically (Grandey et al., 2004). Jaycustomers also threatened business profits by generating large operation costs (Covert, 2007). As such, there has been a call for more focus on investigating jaycustomer behavior (Fisk et al., 2010).
Literature related to jaycustomer behaviors is not scant (Bitner et al., 1994; Harris and Reynolds, 2004; Tsang et al., 2011). Studies about jaycustomer behaviors were specifically prevalent in the hospitality industry because of close server–customer contact, monetary transaction in the service encounter, long operating hours and high density of patrons (Daunt and Harris, 2011). Although casinos also possess these characteristics, no study thus far has been found in the sector. Thus, implications for casino practitioners can only be drawn from findings in other sectors. However, casinos are a very unique sector of hospitality industry. Their uniqueness stems from the large sum of money flow across the casino floor, players’ desire to win, super-charged environment and the negative social impacts like problem gambling. Given the uniqueness of casinos, casino operators can draw little insights from studies in other hospitality contexts. An adoption of the findings drawn from other hospitality sectors is inadequate. Alongside the proliferation of casinos worldwide (Fong et al., 2015), a study on jaycustomer behavior in the casino context can provide significant insights for practitioners. Moreover, the uniqueness of the casino industry implicates that new jaycustomer behavior phenomena would emerge in the casino context....