When recovery discounts backfire: The role of political ideology in shaping post-recovery satisfaction

This research examines the role of political ideology in shaping post-recovery (cumulative) customer satisfaction—that is, customers' overall evaluation of the service experience after a failure and the firm's recovery efforts. Drawing on literature suggesting that conservatives are more sensitive to deservingness norms and more responsive to market-based fairness, we investigate how they react to monetary compensation following a service failure. Across six experiments and a descriptive archival study, we find that conservatives respond less favorably than liberals to modest monetary recovery offers. This occurs because conservatives express a stronger desire for greater compensation, indicating that monetary recovery efforts may fall short of their expectations of what is deserved, thus reducing satisfaction. Importantly, these effects are not observed for non-monetary recovery efforts and can also emerge among liberals when deservingness expectations are made salient. Our findings contribute to service recovery and political ideology research by revealing how ideological beliefs interact with compensation type to shape post-recovery (cumulative) satisfaction. This work also has applied significance: it suggests that recovery discounts may backfire among certain ideological segments and highlights opportunities for tailoring recovery strategies based on local market ideology.