Interpersonal Comparability of Ratings
Bodvarsson and Gibson’s (1999) final criticism of existing tipping research is that its use of
customer service ratings falsely assumes that the meaning of the ratings is comparable across persons.
Although service quality is in the eye of the beholder, Bodvarsson and Gibson are wrong to claim that
service ratings have no interpersonal comparability. Rating scales with labeled end points provide a
metric that allows the subjective experience of one consumer to be compared with that of another
consumer because the end point labels (e.g., “poor” or “excellent”) do have a shared meaning in our
culture. Indeed, Bodvarsson and Gibson (1999) themselves relied on the shared meaning of similar
labels when they asked people how much they would tip under conditions of “satisfactory,” “very
good,” and “poor” service.