Antecedents and Outcomes of Perceived Service Value: Evidence from Slovenia

Perceived value is considered one of the most influential measures of customer satisfaction and is of growing interest to scholars and marketing managers. This paper aims to test a model of perceived value antecedents and consequences in the retail banking industry in the former socialist economy in central Europe. This environment should be of interest to researchers since the majority of perceived value studies have been implemented in developed economies, especially the U.S and even in these countries with an exception of U.S.A. only few researches have dealt with more complex models, with perceived value of banking services as a central concept. However, thus far, no such studies are yet implemented in former socialist economies of Europe. The study also extends extant research by incorporating reputation as an antecedent to perceived value and as an important resource of company competitive sustainable advantage. Content validity of the instrument was assessed by conducting interviews with experts in the field, and face validity was assessed by means of pre-tests with members of the target population (focus groups). In addition, viewpoints related to construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity and nomological validity were assessed with exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM). Data for empirical research is collected from 700 retail banking customers in Slovenia. A structural model with four reflective constructs is evaluated to test the hypothesized relationships. Results indicate the importance of perceived value as a mediating variable in the quality – satisfaction relationship. However, our results show that reputation influences perceived value, only indirectly, via perceived service quality.