Gamification and service quality in bike sharing: an empirical study in Italy

Abstract

PurposeBike sharing (BS) is a phenomenon of growing interest in the sustainable mobility field. In recent years, many governments have implemented concrete actions to diffuse the services in cities, trying to encourage citizens' sustainable behavior. Several mobile applications (apps) related to the mobility sector have embedded gamification mechanics applied in non-gaming contexts, able to create and increase user engagement and to manage users' behavior (Deterding et al., 2011). The main purpose of this study is to understand whether app perception influences gamification, and how gamification improves service quality and user loyalty in BS systems.Design/methodology/approachTo examine the impact of gamification on service quality and loyalty, the study performed secondary data collection and qualitative analysis with in-depth interviews. Thereafter, a quantitative analysis was conducted, and the theoretical model was analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM).Findingsfindings showed that the use of gamification mechanics in BS services improves users' loyalty and directly influences service quality. The gamification tool improves users' engagement, transferring rules, facilitating the achievement of goals and quality standards and enhancing the BS usage.Originality/valueThis study uniquely contributes an understanding of the effect of gamification on service quality and loyalty in BS usage. It also provides some insight for companies and policymakers into implementing gamification mechanics in order to address new challenges for quality management.

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“…The findings of this research indicate that Gamification, taken as a whole, has a large and beneficial impact on individuals' innate motivations. Both Mekler et al (2017) and Pasca et al, (2021) share the same view on the reliability of the outcomes of the studies. In the context of this study, a game on Tokopedia represents the application of "game thinking" in gaming.…”

Can gamified e-service quality improve customer value co-creation and relationship quality in e-retailing?

“…By acknowledging the lack of research on gamified services, scholars such as Wolf et al (2018) studied gamified e-services and indicated that gamified services can influence customers to reuse them. Likewise, Pasca et al (2020) demonstrated the adoption of gamification in bicycle-sharing applications with their impacts on improving service quality, the users' loyalty and promoting bicycle-sharing systems in Italy. Numerous studies conducted on the impact of service quality on relationship quality dimensions, such as satisfaction (Rajaguru, 2016), loyalty (Orel and Kara, 2014) and behavioral tendencies (Orel and Kara, 2014).…”

A Gamified Approach to Engage Sustainable User Behavior in Product Service System Solutions

“…Most of the literature highlighted the behavior change as a crucial advantage, where it is possible to motivate users to have a more sustainable behavior (Blohm & Leimeister, 2013;Bucher & Kreisler, 2020) and co-design Loizou et al, 2019). A gamification approach is able to satisfy needs, enforce autonomy and competence (Xi & Hamari, 2019), improve the service quality and loyalty (Pasca et al, 2020), increase the sustainability performance in terms of energy and water consumption (AlSkaif et al, 2018), reduce CO2 emissions, encourage social collaboration (Albertarelli et al, 2018), among other aspects. In contrast, there are several disadvantages to use gamification (Lister et al, 2014;Petridis et al, 2014), e.g., the overuse of physical rewards might cause that players focus on the rewards instead of having a sustainable behavior (Wells et al, 2014), causing the unbalanced situation of having high effort and low results in the process (Gangolells et al, 2020).…”