
Michael LynnCornell University | CU · School of Hotel Administration
Michael Lynn
social psychology
About
146
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 1995 - present
Education
September 1980 - September 1987
Publications
Publications (146)
Marketing involves a competition between brands, yet very little hospitality marketing research uses brands as the unit-of-analysis. The current paper fills this need by examining the relationships among hotel brands' quality/price tier, number of hotels, building size (average number of rooms per hotel), average customer satisfaction ratings, popu...
Despite its prevalence and importance in the hospitality, personal care, and travel industries, tipping is a form of compensation that does not appeal to all workers. Furthermore, liking of this form of compensation is associated with satisfaction and tenure in tipped occupations, so there is value in correctly anticipating who will and will not li...
A multivariate analysis of brand level data from the restaurant industry found that penetration increased with number of units for limited and full service restaurants (LSRs and FSRs) and with customer service experience ratings for FSRs. For both types of restaurants, average purchase frequency increased reliably with the number of units and with...
Consumers around the world give away billions of dollars annually in the form of voluntary payments (aka, tips) to service workers who have served them. This widespread and important economic activity varies across geographic areas within nations, but that geographic variability has been under-studied. This paper seeks to answer the question: “Are...
Increasing compensation reduces turnover in other industries, but it is unclear if increasing tip percentages will reduce turnover among tipped service workers. This question was examined using a panel data set on the charge tips of restaurant servers over time from POS systems. The results indicate that tip percentages were generally consistent ac...
In the United States, employers can count servers’ tip earnings toward the satisfaction of minimum wage requirements, so that servers are often paid a sub-minimum wage. The difference between the regular and server minimum wage is known as the tip credit and it has come under attack on the grounds that it contributes to server poverty. However, if...
The U.S. Department of Labor recently loosened regulations about who can and cannot participate in tip-sharing and/or pooling and there is interest among restaurateurs and others in expanding use of these policies as a way to reduce front and back-of-house pay differences, so understanding their impact on servers and customers is of practical as we...
Occupational characteristics that predict the likelihood of an occupation receiving tips are shown here to also moderate the effects of individual differences in reciprocity, altruism and duty motives for tipping. For example, low occupational status enhances the effects of all three motives on tipping. These findings support the idea that occupati...
Although tipping is widely considered to be normative behavior, normative influences on tipping have been under studied. A hypothetical scenario experiment examined the effects on tipping of both descriptive and injunctive tipping norms as well as their interactions with one another and with tipping motives. Results support the normative nature of...
The recent COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about consumer willingness to give tips during such times of hardship. Analyses of a Texas pizza delivery driver’s tip records and of nationwide Square payment data for quick- and full-service restaurants explored this issue by comparing tips during the pandemic with those before it. These data suggest...
Knowledge about the personality predictors of tipping attitudes, motives, and behaviors could shed light on the psychological processes underlying tipping and might allow service workers to better predict and manage their tip incomes. To those ends, analyses of online survey data revealed numerous direct and indirect (through tipping motives) Big F...
A field experiment involving 94,571 orders from 24,637 customers of an app-based laundry pick-up, cleaning, and delivery service examined the effects of various randomly assigned tip recommendations on consumers’ tip amounts, satisfaction ratings, frequency of return, and bill size. We find that tip recommendations affect tip amounts, but not custo...
During a service experience, consumers often encounter numerous workers seeking tips. For example, restaurant customers may face implicit tip requests from a parking valet, lounge musician, bartender, hostess, sommelier, waiter, and/or busboy. This raises questions about how the tips given to one worker depend on the performances of their co-worker...
Analysis of online reviews indicates that Royal Caribbean’s abandonment of tipping on March 1, 2013 had no reliable effect on its customers’ ratings of either the overall cruise experience or the cruise service/staff. This finding stands in opposition to previous studies which reported that customer satisfaction and service ratings fell after organ...
Analyses of state differences in minimum wages and tip percentages found that (1) states with higher regular minimum wages have lower average tip percentages in coffee shops and higher average tip percentages in restaurants (after controlling for tipped minimum wages and cost-of-living) and (2) states with higher tipped minimum wages have lower ave...
Despite the size and interdisciplinary scope of the extant literature on domestic tipping behaviors, little research has been done on the tipping behaviors of tourists when traveling abroad. In response, this study presents results from a hypothetical scenario experiment indicating that tipping by US tourists follows the tipping norms of the visite...
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-custome...
Purpose
The extant literature has mixed results regarding the credit card cue effect. Some showed that credit card cues stimulate spending, whereas others were unable to replicate the findings or found that cues discourage consumer spending. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how consumers’ sensitivity to the pain of payment affects their...
The current study attempts to replicate a previous study in this journal reporting that the effects of tipping motives varied across more and less frequently tipped occupations. Results support most, but not all, of the original findings using different measures and more control variables than those used in the original study. Specific findings inc...
Andrew Ehrenberg's work challenges the emphasis that hospitality marketing practitioners, educators and academic researchers place on segmentation, targeting (especially of heavy users), positioning, and meaningful brand differentiation. However, few marketing practitioners and scholars in hospitality appear familiar with this work. This invited pa...
Recently developed statistical tools are used to assess the evidential value and replicability of the published experimental literature on ways to increase tips. Significantly right-skewed full and half p-curves indicate that the literature is more than a collection of Type 1 errors – it provides evidence of real effects. Moreover, those real effec...
This paper contributes to the policy debate about whether or not tipping should be outlawed by identifying the potential pros and cons of tipping from a consumer perspective and assessing their net effects in a field study that compares restaurant customer satisfaction under tipping and no-tipping systems. Recent changes in the restaurant chain Joe...
Many U.S. restaurants have recently adopted no-tipping policies or are considering doing so. This study examines the effects of such moves away from tipping on restaurant’s online customer ratings. The results indicate that (i) restaurants receive lower online customer ratings when they eliminate tipping, (ii) online customer ratings decline more w...
Purpose
This research paper aims to examine the proposed easy money effect brought about by credit cards, which stimulates consumers to over spend. This paper shows how such easy money effect could be weakened.
Design/methodology/approach
In Study 1, an Implicit Association Test (IAT) was conducted with a sample of 169 participants to test the p...
The current study draws from contemporary theories of morality to examine moral motives underlying service employees’ interactions with clientele. Specifically, we posit that employees who exhibit strong moral commitments to service equality (MCSE) are likely to make efforts to treat all clients equally—even when differential treatment is externall...
A survey of several hundred restaurant servers in the United States found that servers’ attitudes toward working for tips and average tip sizes were weakly related (at best) to their service-orientation, intended job-tenure, and occupational-tenure. These findings suggest that tipping does not substantially help to attract and retain more service-o...
Ideas about why consumers tip some service occupations more often than others are tested using occupation scores derived from online ratings of 122 service occupations. Results indicate that U.S. consumers are more likely to tip occupations for which (i) workers’ performances can be more easily evaluated by consumers than by managers, (ii) workers...
Many in the media have called for the abolition of the practice of tipping and at least some resorts, private clubs, hotels, and restaurants have replaced tipping with automatic service charges or service inclusive pricing. Particularly notable in this regard is the cruise industry, where several of the largest brands have switched to an automatic...
This chapter presents the point that successful marketing can be summed up by the segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy. Marketers identify the market segments, direct marketing activities at those segments and position their product offering so as to appeal to the targeted segments. Customers may be differentiated on the basis of demogr...
Racial discrimination in restaurant service is often depicted as an economically rational response to servers' concerns about perceived inadequate tipping by black and/or Hispanic customers. However, drawing from sociological and criminological theories that critique the limits of economic models of human behavior, we argue that discrimination agai...
An Internet survey of a large sample of restaurant waiters and waitresses found that many servers across the United States perceive Christians as bad tippers. This perception is too prevalent to simply ignore. Managers of tipped employees who must serve Christian customers and Christians concerned about the public image of their faith should both s...
In U.S. restaurants, racial and ethnic minorities often tip less than whites. These differences in tipping create numerous problems ranging from discriminatory service to restaurant executives’ reluctance to open restaurants in minority communities. Thus, racial differences in tipping need to be sizably reduced, which requires an understanding of t...
Consumers often give service workers gifts of money in the form of tips. Desires to help servers, reward service, buy future service, buy social status/esteem, avoid social sanctions, and fulfill internalized social obligations have all been proposed as possible explanations for this behavior, but surprisingly little research has documented the eff...
In many countries around the world, consumers leave voluntary payments of money (called “tips”) to service workers who have served them. Since tips are an expense that consumers are free to avoid, tipping is an anomalous behavior that many economists regard as “irrational” or “mysterious.” In this paper, I present a motivational framework that offe...
Consumers around the world often give voluntary sums of money (called "tips") to the service workers who have served them, but the set of tipped professions and the amounts tipped to any one profession differ from country to country. One explanation for these national differences in tipping customs is that they reflect national differences in attit...
Ninety-one attempts to produce an attraction effect (involving a total of 23 product classes and 73 different decoyed choice sets) produced only 11 reliable effects-significantly fewer than expected given the statistical power of the studies. Cross-scenario analyses indicated that the use of meaningful qualitative-verbal descriptions, as well as pi...
There is a rich history of social science research centering on racial inequalities that continue to be observed across various markets (e.g., labor, housing, and credit markets) and social milieus. Existing research on racial discrimination in consumer markets is, however, relatively scarce and that which has been done has disproportionately focus...
In this article we advance scholarship on consumer racial profiling (CRP), in general, and the practice as it occurs in restaurant establishments, in particular, by presenting findings from a survey of restaurant consumers that was designed to ascertain the degree to which discriminate service is evident in black and white customers' perceptions an...
Study participants rated menu prices with an automatic percentage service gratuity
as better deals than equivalent service-included prices when the service component of
price was below the standard 15% tipping rate. However, the reverse was true when
the service component of price was above 15%. Furthermore, a move from percentage
service gratuity...
Many service firms allow their employees to be directly compensated by customers via the institution of tipping despite the fact this practice exposes firms to substantial risks, such as collusion between employees and customers against the firm. This paper examines a potential reason businesses may accept these risks. Specifically, it reports on a...
An online, hypothetical, tipping-scenario experiment found that subjects tipped the servers less (not more) when those servers wore a red shirt than when they wore a white or black one and that female subjects perceived a waiter (but not a waitress) as less attractive when wearing a red shirt than when wearing a white or black shirt. These findings...
Consumers selected round prices and/or sales-totals at greater than chance levels across two different pay-what-you-want situations and one self-pumped gasoline purchase. The differences among these situations suggest that the tendency to select round prices/sales-totals reflects a subjective preference (or liking) for round prices and not a variet...
A web-based survey was used to assess the relationships of religious faith and frequency of church attendance with tipping under conditions of good and bad service. Results indicated that Jews and those with no religion tipped more than Christians and members of other religions, but that the vast majority of Christians tipped at or above the normat...
Asians and Hispanics are perceived by many restaurant servers as poor tippers. This study tests the validity of those perceptions using data from a large restaurant chain's online customer satisfaction survey. Findings partially support servers' perceptions—Hispanics but not Asians tipped less on average than Whites after controlling for bill size,...
Two studies found that higher socioeconomic status reduced differences between black and white patrons in stiffing and flat tipping, but increased black–white differences in the amount tipped by those who did tip. The finding that movement up the socioeconomic ladder increases black–white differences in tip size suggests that efforts to address the...
A re-analysis of two national telephone surveys found that black–white differences in awareness that it is customary to tip a percentage of the bill declined as socio-economic status increased. However, black–white differences in awareness that is customary to tip 15–20 percent in restaurants was unrelated to socio-economic status. The practical as...
A large web-based survey found that (a) awareness of the 15% to 20% tipping norm partially mediates Black–White and Hispanic–White differences in restaurant tip size and (b) norm awareness predicts restaurant tip size for Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites alike. These findings replicate and extend previous research results reported by Lynn and suggest...
Consumers in many countries often give voluntary payments of money (tips) to the workers who have served them. These tips are supposed to be a reward for service and research indicates that they do increase with customers' perceptions of service quality. This paper contributes to the service-tipping literature by examining numerous potential modera...
With the encouragement of marketing scholars, many companies are tying employee incentives to customer ratings of satisfaction, service quality, or employee performance. One potential drawback to these practices is that customers' evaluations of employees—and, therefore, any associated rewards—may be biased by employee race. This possibility was ex...
Gratuities paid by consumers are widely used to compensate workers in the service industry despite the fact that this practice permits and even encourages a variety of negative practices – from customer–employee collusion against the interests of the firm to service discrimination against consumers thought to be poor tippers. Such negative effects...
On average, blacks tip less than whites in the United States. As a result, many servers dislike waiting on black tables and deliver inferior service to those blacks seated in their sections. Furthermore, this race difference makes it difficult to attract and retain waitstaff in predominately black neighborhoods, which makes such neighborhoods less...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a model which defines the psychological processes that mediate the relationship between perceived wait duration (PWD) and satisfaction. This model will provide a framework for evaluating the impact of situational and environmental variables in the servicescape on customer reaction to the wait...
Restaurant tips are supposed to be an incentive/reward for the delivery of good service. For tipping to serve this function, consumers must leave larger tips in response to better service. Numerous studies have found a relationship between evaluations of service and tip size, but these studies have involved between-subjects, correlational designs t...
From a mainstream economic perspective, tipping is often seen as a rather anomalous or irrational economic activity since consumers could legally and willingly avoid paying tips altogether. Nevertheless, this pervasive economic activity generates tens of billions of dollars in income a year, worldwide. In order to better understand this seemingly i...
Marketing scholars have proposed that service employees play a primary role in delivering service quality. However, the question of how to motivate service employees to enhance service production has received little research attention. The authors address this gap by advocating a control mechanism first discussed in the economics literature-buyer m...
A web-based survey of consumers finds that: (i) individual differences in self-attributed motives for tipping load on two factors – intrinsic and self-presentational motives,(ii) more people claim to tip for intrinsic reasons than for self-presentational reasons, (iii) demographic differences in motives for tipping are small, (iv) individual differ...
In a 1996 article in Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Michael Lynn introduced the idea that restaurant managers could increase their servers' tips, and thereby reduce turnover, by training the servers to engage in one or more of seven tip-enhancing behaviors. Since then, the list of tip-enhancing behaviors has expanded, and a...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline the business issues surrounding tipping and its alternatives, to summarize what is known about those issues, and to identify questions in need of further research.
Design/methodology/approach
Objectives are achieved via conceptual analysis and review of relevant literature.
Findings
The paper finds...
Waitresses completed an on-line survey about their physical characteristics, self-perceived attractiveness and sexiness, and average tips. The waitresses' self-rated physical attractiveness increased with their breast sizes and decreased with their ages, waist-to-hip ratios, and body sizes. Similar effects were observed on self-rated sexiness, with...
This study examined the effects of server race, customer race, and their interaction on restaurant tips while statistically controlling for customers' perceptions of service quality and other variables. The findings indicate that consumers of both races discriminated against Black service providers by tipping them less than White service providers....
Two studies replicate and extend (Lynn, 2000) research on national personality and tipping customs. Study 1 finds that national extraversion and psychoticism, but not neuroticism, are related to customary tip sizes. Study 2 finds effects on attitudes and self-reported behavior of personality at the individual level of analysis that only partially s...
This study examined the effects on tips left by Black and White restaurant patrons of having a White waitress sit down or lean over at the table during the service encounter. A significant server posture by patron race interaction was obtained. Sitting at the table significantly increased the tips left by White patrons and marginally significantly...
Research on race differences in tipping suggests that (1) Blacks leave smaller average restaurant tips than doWhites, (2) Black-White differences in tipping persist after controlling for socio-economic status, (3) Blacks tip less than Whites even when provided comparable levels of service, (4) Blacks tip less than Whites even when the server is bla...
Ratios of one variable over another are frequently used in social psychological research in order to control for a linear relationship between the numerator and the denominator. However, the use of ratio variables can introduce spuriousness into data analyses. This article provides a description and explanation of the problem of spuriousness in rat...
Researchers in psychology and marketing have found that consumers' perceptions and evaluations of a product's attractiveness, desirability, expensiveness, quality, and taste are affected by knowledge that the product is scarce. This study examines scarcity's effect on a new variable—anticipated price appreciation. Although scarcity does not affect...
The effect of server posture (standing vs. squatting) on the size of tip left by restaurant customers was examined in two naturalistic experiments. In these studies, squatting down next to the tables increased servers’ tips from those tables. Both the practical implications of this effect and its similarity to other nonverbal effects on tipping are...
A common practice among servers in restaurants is to give their dining parties an unexpected gift in the form of candy when delivering the check. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the impact of this gesture on the tip percentages received by servers. Experiment 1 found that customers who received a small piece of chocolate along with the c...
Tips represent a substantial portion of restaurant waiters' and waitresses' incomes. We report a study that examines several potential predictors of the differences in servers' average tip earnings. Our results indicate that servers earn larger average sales-adjusted tips if they are attractive females, better service providers, and high self-monit...
In this paper, we report an original study of the relationships between self-attributed need for uniqueness and several consumer dispositions. The results indicate that the self-attributed need for uniqueness is related to consumers' desires for scarce, innovative, and customized products and to consumers' preferences for unusual shopping venues, b...
Since its origins in 18th-century English pubs, tipping has become a custom involving numerous professions and billions of dollars. Knowledge of the psychological factors underlying tipping would benefit service workers, service managers, and customers alike. Two studies were conducted to provide such knowledge about restaurant tipping. The percent...
A reputation for honesty and trustworthiness is important to success in sales. In this article, we report 2 experiments examining the effects on perceived salesperson honesty of information about how the salesperson is compensated (commissions vs. straight salary). In both experiments, commissioned salesmen were perceived as less honest than were n...
A national telephone survey indicated that knowledge about the restaurant tipping norm is greater among people who are White, in their 40 s to 60 s, highly educated, wealthy, living in metropolitan areas, and living in the Northeast than among their counterparts. These findings support the idea that differential familiarity with tipping norms under...
Extraversion and neuroticism interact to affect subjective well-being (SWB) at the individual level of analysis, so that introverted
neurotics tend to be particularly miserable. The goal of this study is to determine if this interaction can also be detected
at a national level. Findings based on data from 30 countries confirmed that the interaction...
Tipping is generally regarded in the industry as more of a server concern than a managerial one. For this reason, it is the rare restaurant executive or manager who tries to actively influence the level of his or her servers' tip incomes. I believe that is a mistake—that restaurant executives and managers can and should increase their servers' tip...
Marketing and organizational - behavior scholars have identified several control mechanisms - behavioral, outcome, and clan - for managing employee performance. However, these mechanisms are inadequate in contexts characterized by high customer contact and complex, customizable service interactions (e.g., restaurant dining or spa services). In such...
Data from a national telephone survey revealed 4 general patterns in the tipping behaviors of Blacks and Whites. First, Blacks appear more likely than Whites to stiff commonly encountered service providers, but not less commonly encountered ones. Second, Blacks appear more likely than Whites to leave flat tip amounts to service providers who are co...
This study examines the relationships between national values and tipping customs in a sample of 45 nations. The results of the study conceptually replicate and extend the work of Lynn, Zinkhan and Harris (1993) by demonstrating for the first time that national values predict international differences in customary tip sizes as well as international...
Bodvarsson et al. (20033.
Bodvarsson , OB ,
Luksetich , WA and
McDermott , S . 2003. Why do diners tip: rule-of-thumb or valuation of service?. Applied Economics, 35: 1659–65. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®]View all references) argue that a non-recursive relationship between service and tipping has led researchers to underestimate...
Studies of tipping behavior indicate that black customers tend to leave lower tips than do white customers. Rather than unnecessarily demean a customer group, however, the industry should try to understand and address the underlying cause of this ethnic difference in tipping. The results of the study reported here suggest that differences in tippin...
Restaurant patrons were asked to rate their service using either a semantic differential scale or an unbounded write-in scale. The service indices derived from semantic differential and unbounded write-in scales had different distributions, but did not differ in their relationship to tip percentages. The non-significant service by scale-type intera...
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many waiters and waitresses deliver poor service to ethnic minorities because they believe that ethnic minorities are poor tippers. How managers should deal with this problem depends in part on whether or not ethnic minorities really do tip less than Whites and (if they do) on when and why this occurs. This paper re...
In this paper, we critically review various explanations for the magnitude effect in tipping and offer a simpler explanation for this effect. We also present a simulation that demonstrates the plausibility of our explanation. The practical implications of both the magnitude effect in tipping and our explanation for it are discussed.
Using survey data, we identify a variety of factors that influence tipping behavior and in the process lay out a simple theoretical framework to help to interpret our empirical observations. We first investigate the efficiency of observed tipping behavior. While there are elements of efficiency—notably, percent tip depends on service quality—it doe...
This study used restaurant level data from a casual-dining restaurant chain in the Midwestern United States to examine turnover's relationships with sales, tips and service. Turnover was negatively correlated with sales and service among high-volume restaurants but not among low-volume restaurants. Interestingly, the opposite pattern was observed f...