Hikaru Goto, PhD
Hikaru Goto, PhD
Assistant Professor · Service Marketing and Consumer Behavior
Profile
I study the conditions that enable people to achieve goals they value through services
I am an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at Osaka University of Economics and Law, specializing in service marketing and consumer behavior. I study how customers’ readiness, literacy, and available resources interact with participation demands, support, options, and institutional arrangements in services. I am particularly interested in why customers using the same service follow different paths—continuing independently, using support, switching to another option, postponing, or giving up—and how these paths shape their opportunities to achieve goals they value.
My work connects customer participation and customer co-creation readiness with co-creation gaps, service design, and Transformative Service Literacy. I distinguish completing a provider’s intended service pathway from achieving the customer’s own goals, and examine differences in substantive opportunities for value realization. Consumer well-being is a long-term normative concern; individual studies address specific processes and outcomes relevant to their research questions.
Before joining academia, I worked in the private sector. I received a PhD in Knowledge Science from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and an MBA from Doshisha University.
Research Interests
Three connected areas guide my research
Customer participation and co-creation readiness
I conceptualize and develop measures of Customer Co-Creation Readiness (CCCR), focusing on customers’ readiness to understand and perform their roles and their motivation to participate in service provision. I examine how readiness fits the demands and support of a particular service, rather than treating it as a fixed ranking of customers.
Co-creation gaps and service design
I study how the interaction between participation demands and CCCR leads customers to continue independently, use support, switch to another option, postpone, or give up. These paths can produce co-creation gaps: differences in the likelihood, burden, and extent of goal attainment. I examine when support, alternative options, and changes to participation demands can reduce these gaps.
Transformative Service Literacy and opportunities for value realization
I am developing Transformative Service Literacy (TSL), a concept proposed in my doctoral dissertation, as a way of understanding foundational abilities related to understanding, evaluating, and using services to pursue goals people value. I examine how these abilities relate to information, support, available options, and service environments, with the long-term aim of understanding how services can expand people’s substantive opportunities.
Selected Publications
Recent journal articles
2026
Framing the Attitude-Behavior Gap as Structural Disconnection: A Dual-Level Diagnostic of Customer Experience Quality
Goto, H. (2026). Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 92, 104814.
2025
Value Co-Destruction Causing Customers to Stop Service Usage: A Topic Modelling Analysis of Dental Service Complaint Data
Goto, H., Belal, H. M., & Shirahada, K. (2025). Annals of Operations Research, 348, 1691–1711.
2022
Customer Analysis and ISM Practice by ID-POS in Drugstores for Narrow Trade Areas
Goto, H., Oike, Y., & Yamashita, T. (2022). Marketing Review, 3(1), 3–11.
Contact
Get in touch
For inquiries regarding research collaboration, invited talks, teaching, or publications, please use the inquiry form. You may also email h-goto [at] keiho-u.ac.jp.