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Towards an Expectation-Oriented Model of Public Service Quality: A Preliminary Study of NYC 311

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13618))

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Abstract

The 311 system has been deployed in many U.S. cities to manage non-emergency civic issues such as noise and illegal parking. To assess the performance of 311-mediated public service provision, researchers developed models based on execution time and the status of execution. However, research on user satisfaction suggests that the level of individuals’ perception is asymmetric with respect to the quality of services, because negative experiences have a stronger impact on people’s dissatisfaction than positive experiences do for satisfaction. Informed by the uneven nature of human satisfaction regarding positive and negative service quality, we propose an expectation-based model that measures the quality of public services by adapting the asymmetric function that reflects different perceptions of positive and negative experiences. Our preliminary analysis using the NYC 311 and Census data provides an initial assessment of the model’s validity.

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Acknowledgment

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (1816763 and 2217706). We thank NSF, reviewers, and the committee.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Julia Hsin-Ping Hsu & Myeong Lee

  2. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85281, USA

    Jieshu Wang

Authors
  1. Julia Hsin-Ping Hsu
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  2. Jieshu Wang
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  3. Myeong Lee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Myeong Lee .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany

    Frank Hopfgartner

  2. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kokil Jaidka

  3. GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Cologne, Germany

    Philipp Mayr

  4. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Joemon Jose

  5. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Jan Breitsohl

Appendices

A Example Comparisons Between Execution Time and Quality score

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Comparison between execution time and service quality score of two types of 311 reports in NYC on census tract level. Panel (a) and (b) are about report type “blocked driveway,” while Panel (c) and (d) are about “large item collection” type. The middle points of the color coding (yellow) represent the neutral values in each case. Solving an issue exactly on time results in a quality score around 0.7 given the preset parameters \(\alpha =1\) and \(\beta =1.5\). Therefore, the neutral values in Panel (b) and (d) are set to 0.7. Tracts with longer median execution time or lower quality score are colored in red, while tracts with shorter execution time or higher quality score are colored in green. (Color figure online)

Full size image

B Comparison Between Aggregated Execution Time and Aggregated Quality Score

Fig. 3.
figure 3

(a) Aggregated execution time and (b) aggregated service quality scores across five types of 311 reports in NYC. In Panel (a), the color legend is centered at the mean value of the aggregated execution times across all census tracts, which is around 0.09 in this case, and about 98% census tracts have aggregated execution times within the range of the color legend. Any tract with longer execution time is colored with the darkest red. In Panel (b), the color legend is centered at the quality score that represents the scenario where service is delivered exactly on time, which is around 0.7 given the preset parameters \(\alpha =1\) and \(\beta =1.5\). (Color figure online)

Full size image

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Hsu, J.HP., Wang, J., Lee, M. (2022). Towards an Expectation-Oriented Model of Public Service Quality: A Preliminary Study of NYC 311. In: Hopfgartner, F., Jaidka, K., Mayr, P., Jose, J., Breitsohl, J. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13618. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-19097-1

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