Consumer Behaviour in Restaurants: Assessing the Importance of Restaurant Attributes in Consumer Patronage and Willingness to Pay

212 213The purpose of the paper is to explore the relationship between restaurant attributes and consumers' willingness to patronize. Current research shows that the most common factors affecting restaurant guests while making this decision are: food quality, service quality, and overall restaurant environment. The present paper explores these three factors and their effect on consumers' willingness to pay and their willingness to patronize when these factors are modified from low to high and vice versa. A dynamic comparison method using scenario-based experimental primary research has been used for the current study. It is a 2 × 2 × 3 experiment with two types of restaurants (full-service and quick service), two levels of performance (high and low) and three major attributes (food quality, service, and ambience). Contrary to the commonly held notion in economic literature that the relationship between consumers' willingness to pay and the elasticity (intention to patronize) for restaurants' attributes is linear, the current results indicated that this relationship is not linear thus demanding further investigation. Additionally, questioning the earlier conclusions that all restaurant attributes are equally important in consumer decision-making, the current results indicated that consumers place differential importance on each attribute. And the level of importance placed on each attribute varies with the type of restaurant, upscale or quick service. This is one of the major contributions of the paper questioning the long-held belief and early empirical studies about restaurant attributes. The obtained results also indicated that food quality is more important than service and ambience for consumers in upscale restaurants while speed of service is more important than food quality and ambience in quick service restaurants. Customers in both upscale and quick service restaurants are willing to spend more if the restaurants' resources are focused on attributes that are appropriate for that segment. These findings are significantly important to the restaurant industry as they identify the critical attributes for each segment of the restaurant industry.