Establishing service fairness has garnered much interest as a compelling practice for achieving business success. While the previous studies have predominantly discussed the significance of fairness in a firm's service failure and recovery efforts, this study addressed service fairness issues within, as well as outside of, the service failure context and examined the applicability of fairness concepts as a lens for evaluating services. In order to achieve the goals of identifying the underlying structure of perceived service fairness within an inclusive service delivery context and investigating its relationship with emotional and behavioral responses, the present study proposed and empirically tested a service fairness model based on the Mehrabian-Russell's (1974) framework. To this end, a total of 326 questionnaire responses were collected from real restaurant customers during their restaurant experiences. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis supported a four-factor structure of service fairness, which has integrated a customer benefits and sacrifice perspective with the original fairness theory. This four-factor structure would be better for evaluating restaurant services instead of the three-factor model that has frequently been applied in service failure and recovery contexts. The results of the Structural Equation Modeling showed different roles for each of the fairness perceptions (price fairness, procedural fairness, outcome fairness, and interactional fairness) in relation to emotions (positive/negative) and behavioral intentions. The mediating role of positive emotion was also found between price, interactional fairness, and future behavioral outcomes. This study is theoretically and managerially meaningful to the service marketing literature because it addresses fairness issues as a novel scheme for evaluating services in an inclusive service delivery contexts (with or without service failure), while building on the theories of fairness in the restaurant consumption experience. Given the causal relationship among each factor of service fairness, two types of emotions, and behavioral intentions, restaurant managers will be able to develop more effective and efficient strategies for ensuring fairness, thus resulting in higher levels of customer retention. Limitations and future research directions are also discussed.
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