Hikaru Goto, PhD
Hikaru Goto, PhD
Assistant Professor · Service Marketing and Consumer Research
Profile
I study how customer participation shapes service experiences and outcomes
I am an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at Osaka University of Economics and Law. My research examines the demands placed on customers during service use and customers’ readiness to meet those demands. I am particularly interested in why customers facing similar service requirements follow different paths: continuing independently, seeking support, switching to another option, postponing, or discontinuing service use.
My work connects customer participation and customer co-creation readiness with customer experience, value co-creation and value co-destruction, continued use, and well-being. 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
Four connected areas guide my research
Customer participation and readiness
Customer participation and customer co-creation readiness, including the knowledge, capabilities, motivation, and resources needed for service use.
Customer experience and behavior
Customer experience quality, relative satisfaction, continued use, and the structural disconnection between favorable evaluations and behavioral outcomes.
Value formation and well-being
Value co-creation, value co-destruction, resource integration, and the conditions under which services improve or diminish well-being.
Transformative service research
Service systems that support customer agency and participation, especially in healthcare and other professional service contexts.
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.