New Directions for Customer-to-Customer Interaction Research

In recent years service researchers have increasingly given attention to the multitude of relationships that may occur in the production, delivery and consumption of services. An important driver of this tendency has been the rise of the relationship marketing paradigm. This paradigm has equipped marketing management with a theoretical foundation for going beyond the customer-supplier dyad and incorporating other relationships. The customer-to-customer relationship is one such relationship. Although it can occur in a number of different contexts, this paper concentrates on direct interactions between customers taking place in physical service settings, that is, customer-to-customer interaction (CCI). The paper seeks to answer two questions:
1 What have been the main accomplishments of CCI research?
2 What directions might be fruitful for advancing our understanding of CCI and its management?