Customers who feel gratitude toward a firm are motivated to engage in direct reciprocity. However, does gratitude's effect extend beyond the original dyadic interaction to affect relationships with other potential customers? Drawing from indirect reciprocity theory, we propose an extended reciprocity cycle of customer gratitude in which existing customer relationships are strengthened through direct reciprocity and new customer relationships are initiated through indirect reciprocity. Through an experiment, Study 1 demonstrates that employee‐centric reviews are written by grateful customers because they desire to help the firm. Utilizing another experiment, Study 2 reveals that gratitude‐driven employee‐centric reviews significantly increase other consumers' attitudes toward helpful service firms (i.e., positioned as having a sincere brand personality). Study 3 extends the prior findings using field data from Yelp, revealing that employee‐centric reviews are perceived as more useful when shown for sincere rather than sophisticated brands. Collectively, results indicate that customer gratitude fosters not only direct reciprocity, but also indirect reciprocity by encouraging other consumers to reward firms that help customers, signaling to practitioners the importance of managing customers' emotional experiences and strategically placing gratitude‐driven content.

中文翻译：

---

延长互惠感激周期：感激如何增强现有的能力并建立新的客户关系

对公司怀有感激之情的客户会积极参与直接互惠。但是，感恩的影响是否会超出最初的二元互动，从而影响与其他潜在客户的关系？从间接互惠理论出发，我们提出了一个延长的客户感恩互惠周期，其中通过直接互惠加强现有客户关系，并通过间接互惠建立新的客户关系。通过一项实验，研究1证明了以员工为中心的评论是由感激的客户撰写的，因为他们希望帮助公司。研究2利用另一个实验发现，以谢意为中心的以员工为中心的评论大大提高了其他消费者对有益的服务公司的态度（例如，定位为具有真诚的品牌个性）。研究3使用来自Yelp的现场数据扩展了先前的发现，发现以员工为中心的评论在显示真诚的品牌而不是精致的品牌时被认为更有用。总体而言，结果表明，客户的感恩不仅通过鼓励其他消费者奖励帮助客户的公司来促进直接的互惠，而且通过间接的互惠来鼓励向客户提供帮助的公司，从而向从业人员传达了管理客户的情感体验和战略性地放置感恩驱动的内容的重要性。